The Expanse (featuring James S.A. Corey)

Daniel and Kelly talk to Daniel Abrahams and Ty Franck, the authors behind The Expanse series. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:18Daniel Whiteson?

  So thanks very much, guys, for coming on the show. And before we dig in, I want to do my due diligence and point out that I'm the only one on this call to not have won a Hugo Award, because Kelly also won a Hugo.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  If you have fewer than three, it's like you don't have one.

• 2:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks, Ty. You know, he did write us the night we got our Hugo to tell us that.

• 2:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow, he just rounded you down to zero Hugos. All right. Well, welcome to the less than three Hugo Club, Kelly.

• 2:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks.

• 2:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Me, you, and most of the planet.

• 2:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  We'll drink after this.

• 3:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. I'm Daniel Weitzman. I'm a particle physicist, a huge sci-fi reader, and a big fan of The Expanse.

• 3:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and write about space, and I love The Expanse so much because it's got like parasites and space.

• 3:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Parasites in space.

• 3:27Daniel Whiteson?

  So do you only read science fiction novels that contain weird, evil microorganisms?

• 3:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Unfortunately, no. There's just not that many to choose from. But no, I love all sci-fi. What's your favorite sci-fi story?

• 3:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I'm a big fan of almost anything that is hard science fiction that, you know, picks a set of rules and really follows it. I read a lot of science fiction, though. I'm a big fan of Ian Banks, Alistair Reynolds, Adrian Cheikovsky, The Expanse, of course. I just can't get enough.

• 3:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  I love The Expanse. I also really like the Strugatzky brothers. They were writing during this like Soviet Union time, and they've got this book called Roadside Picnic, which just like guts me every time. And it's just such an interesting world and like also kind of gets me sort of teary eyed. Anyway, it's a, it's great. So I don't necessarily love the hard stuff. I just love a world that is created that is interesting, where they're consistent with the rules. That's all I want is consistency in a world that's been made that's interesting.

• 4:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Another subcategory of sci-fi that I love. Is science fiction written by professors. For example, I love Werner Vinge, and he was a professor in San Diego until very recently. And of course, I love that because it makes me feel like maybe one day I could also write science fiction, but also because it's good.

• 4:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I happen to know that you are a good writer in a variety of different genres. Yes, you got this.

• 4:46Daniel Whiteson?

  We'll see. But today, we're not talking about Daniel's science fiction preferences. We're talking to actual massively successful, very influential writers of The Expanse.

• 4:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, we somehow managed to get The Expanse guys on our show. We're super excited and let's just dig right in so we can spend most of the time talking to them.

• 5:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. So for those of you who aren't familiar with the series, it's a set of books set in the near future where humanity has colonized the solar system, but effectively split into a few groups, folks living on Earth, folks living on Mars, folks living in the Belt. Then they each end up with their own different culture. And there's lots of fun space battles where they really take care of the physics and the gravity. And then there's some unexpected stuff that happens.

• 5:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  And they're just so good at character writing. All right, let's do this. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Today, we have the authors of The Expanse, Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham. And instead of like telling you about how they got like a Hugo and maybe more than one Hugo, maybe four or something like that, I'm going to tell you the story about how we all met because it explains how Daniel and Kelly managed to land The Expanse guys on our show, which is a pretty lucky catch for us. So many years ago, back when it was possible for little nerds like Zach and I to afford booths at San Diego Comic Con, we had a booth for our sketch comedy theater, our sketch comedy show, SNC Theater.

• 6:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And Ty came to our booth not to tell us that we were funny, but to tell us that our friend James was funny. But James wasn't there. And so he got stuck talking to us. And it turns out that Ty has a really like brilliant, amazing wife. And so we all got along pretty well. And then when Zach and I moved across the country, we asked if we could stop at their place on the way and they said yes. And we brought- brought our cats with us and we made a big mistake because the cats were in the guest room and I opened up the door real quick and they both ran out and they hid in their fireplace and then I went to try to get them out of there and they ran across their house and put little kitty soot footprints all over the place. We haven't been back to

• 6:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  their place yet. Probably those two pieces of information are not related, but maybe they are. But Ty mentions during that trip that he had like a space opera thing that was gonna come out soon and it turned out that was the expanse. So, you know, after hanging out with us, he became a really big deal. Maybe correlated, who knows. But importantly, he virtually introduced me to Daniel, who has a book called Unclean Spirits, which has a main character who's a parasitologist who is both attractive and very smart. Parasitologists are not usually portrayed in that light. If we're portrayed at all, we're kind of like creepy. And when I mentioned this to my husband, he pointed out that that book also has vampires and is fiction. You know, so if anybody needs someone to rain on their

• 7:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  parade, I can give you my husband's phone number. So anyway, Daniel and Ty are both wonderful, amazing people. It's so much fun to have them on the show. They write together as James S.A. Corey for the expanse and other projects. They also do amazing work separately. Welcome to the show.

• 7:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

• 7:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is that about how you remember it, Ty? Did you ever get to meet James?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, I bet James, James is in many of your videos, wearing the Game of Thrones t-shirt I gave him.

• 8:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, nice. Oh, fantastic. He's also in a lot of our videos not wearing a shirt at all. So lots of options there.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  He's, he's very brave. He's a very brave comedic actor.

• 8:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, he is. He is. All right. So Daniel, how about you kick it off with the first question?

• 8:16Daniel Whiteson?

  So we're gonna ask you lots of science questions about the universe you created. But first, I'm gonna calibrate where you are in the sort of science fiction spectrum by asking you a classic science fiction philosophy, science question, which is about Star Trek transporters. In your opinion, does a Star Trek transporter actually relocate you?

• 8:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Or does it kill you and re-materialize you somewhere else?

• 8:38Speaker 04

  I mean, it clearly kills you because it disintegrates you. So your dad, and then it makes, and then it makes a perfect copy of you. But there's an argument to be made that that happens every time you fall asleep too. So.

• 8:50Speaker 06

  This is like arguing canonicity. This is like saying, is Luke really, uh, you know, one I there is a pattern. The pattern is recreated elsewhere. Consciousness is an illusion. Consciousness can be two illusions. Consciousness can be eight illusions. Consciousness can be illusions in different places. You don't actually exist to begin with. So what does that even mean?

• 9:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa, this got, this got philosophical fast.

• 9:16Speaker 06

  That's what I was saying.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  The best and darkest transporter story ever written is by, um, uh, James Patrick Kelly. Fantastic. One of the best short story writers in science fiction. He wrote a story called Think Like A Dinosaur, which was later adapted and turned into an episode of The Outer Limits in the nineties. And it is the best, darkest transporter story ever written. So you should definitely, if you're into like, does the transporter kill you? You should read that one.

• 9:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  Think Like A Dinosaur is on my list now.

• 9:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, what I love about this question is that the teleporter in Star Trek was of course, invented in the sixties or conceived of much earlier. And now that we know so much more about quantum mechanics and quantum information and the no cloning theorem, you know, science has actually informed the philosophy of this question. So it's a lot of fun.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Any process that begins with your own disintegration should be, should be questioned heavily.

• 10:11Speaker 06

  Your, as if there were, as if there was a standard you.

• 10:16Daniel Whiteson?

  There's also an argument to be made from a particle physics perspective, that all of your quantum objects are interacting constantly and therefore transforming. And the process of being dematerialized and materialized somewhere else is equivalent to the process of just moving forward through time as quantum fields ripple with energy. So then I have to agree with the other Daniel that like, maybe you don't even exist in any sense.

• 10:38Speaker 06

  This is a problem of narrative framing. The actual issue here is that what's going on doesn't fit gracefully into our language. And that's our language's fault.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  When I first met Daniel, he was very powerfully on the, um, Free will side, I think years of association with me have beaten him down to the mechanistic universe.

• 10:57Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, that is not true. I am still firmly in the free will universe.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, because that's what the universe has programmed you to say.

• 11:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm gonna pull us back a little. So when did you two meet, speaking of meeting each other? And how did it transform into a writing partnership?

• 11:18Speaker 04

  At Boobonica.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  That would have been 2006?

• 11:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Boobonica? Is this like a festival celebrating the Boobonic plague?

• 11:29Speaker 06

  Basically, yes. It's the, it's the local science fiction convention in Albuquerque. And because we still have the black plague in New Mexico, we have Perry Rodent as our mascot, and we just kind of lean into the dark.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  It's also the only state in the country where you are likely to get a hemorrhagic fever.

• 11:49Speaker 06

  Well, not likely. We are, however, number two in the world for necrotizing fasciitis.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  There's also a huntavirus. Are you a New Mexican, Daniel? I didn't realize.

• 11:58Speaker 06

  I am. No, I was, I was born here. Ty actually came through briefly, and that's where we, we met and started the project. And then he fled to someplace with water and greenery.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  I grew up in Los Alamos, so I'm a New Mexican as well.

• 12:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, Los Alamos. That, that, that actually explains a lot, right there.

• 12:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so you, you met at the Boobonic Plague Festival?

• 12:22Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 12:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  And, and then how did that turn into a writing partnership?

• 12:26Speaker 06

  Well, there were a couple of things. We had a friend in common who was in the critique group that I was part of at the time. And Ty had sold a short story and was therefore eligible to come play in the critique group and, and did. So we knew each other through that. And Ty also, I don't know, out of the kindness of his heart, saw the, the sad, lonely, Daniel, new dad, working too hard guy, and said, why don't I degrade his productivity? And invited me over to play video games at his place on Wednesdays.

• 13:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you said yes?

• 13:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I love playing video games. And he hooked me on Left 4 Dead, so then I was screwed. Then I had to go get my fix.

• 13:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then The Expanse. Was The Expanse your first writing project together?

• 13:13Speaker 06

  We did some other little stuff, kind of along the way, but The Expanse was definitely the, the big one.

• 13:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And how does your process work writing together? Does one of you outline, the other one flesh it out? Do you guys brainstorm together? Are you guys both editing the Google Doc at the same time?

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Daniel's in charge of consonants and I am in charge of vowels.

• 13:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's gotta be a slow process.

• 13:35Speaker 06

  Not compared to some, yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Not when you're typing on the same keyboard.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  Generally, we outline together, then one of us will do the first draft of a chapter and the other guy will edit the first draft and we'll just kind of iterate through that.

• 13:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Who's the outline guy or does it alternate?

• 13:50Speaker 06

  Oh, no, there's, there's no outline. Outlining is a, a group project.

• 13:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  And my collaboration with Zach, I'm the outline guy. So we, we don't have, but anyway. All right, so your books are so well-written that when I was researching for my book on space settlement, I was blown away by how many times I came across citations of The Expanse as though it were a documentary. And that kind of blew my mind. And so was it important to you that you created a world that followed the rules as we know it or not really? What, what do you think? Is it important to follow rules or make up your own?

• 14:23Speaker 04

  We get a lot of credit for being hard sci-fi that isn't actually accurate. There's, there's kind of, there's only two rules that Daniel and I never broke in The Expanse. And because every other science fiction project breaks those two rules constantly, we seemed like weird and exotic. In The Expanse, gravity works the way gravity really works. So spaceships in The Expanse are not like ocean liners where the deck runs the length of the ship. Spaceships in The Expanse are built like office towers so that the deck is below you. In the direction that the thrust is coming from. So when the engine fires, you are pushed into the deck rather than being slid backwards the whole length of the ship and into a wall.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  So that was one way that one thing that we never broke. And the other one we never broke is that light speed is a rule. And so there's no faster than light communication. So if you send a message to your buddy, you're unearthed and you send a message to your buddy out by Jupiter, it takes three hours to get there. And by the time you get a reply, it's been six hours have passed. And because every other sci fi thing just hand waves those two things away. There's gravity plating or there's hyperwave communication. We seemed very exotic and hard because of that, but the rest of it, we just kind of were, you know.

• 15:39Speaker 06

  A lot of the science in there came from the stuff we were already kind of excited by too. So, I mean, Ty got Ganymede right because he'd been playing with astronomy and knew that Ganymede was the place that had the magnetosphere and kind of knew what magnetosphere were and did. So we had that level of kind of introductory knowledge. And that level of introductory knowledge has a bunch of cool stuff in it. So we stole all the cool stuff. And I think that also kind of worked to our benefit in plausibility.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  I mean, we do sort of ignore the fact that anybody living on Ganymede would be massively irradiated by Jupiter's enormous radiation belt.

• 16:25Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  You know, so, I mean, there's, there's plenty of stuff you just sort of ignore. And in your book on Mars, you know, there's a ton of reasons why you wouldn't want to live on Mars. But it's cool if people live on Mars. So in the book, people live on Mars, even though there's like no reason to go there and it would be a terrible.

• 16:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm going to push back a little though, because, you know, Ty was like, oh, we only followed these two rules. But I think it wasn't just that you got all the physics right. It's that you also thought through people so well and governing so well and how the environment would impact the way that people interact with each other and how they can be governed and stuff like that. And so it wasn't just the physics, it was you thought through all the different science fields, the biology, the psychology, the sociology.

• 17:10Speaker 06

  A lot of that's just, you know, Ty, Ty had read a lot of history and a lot of the issues that you see in the expanse are things that. Our science fiction reskinnings of how humans have been working since we stopped being monkeys. We're a very consistent species. The stupid shit we do, we have been doing forever. And we just projected that into the future.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, I mean, that people ask like, what is the theme of the expanse? And, you know, the the serious one is that tribalism is bad. But the jokey one is people do the same stupid shit over and over and over and have done for the last 250,000 years that we've been in this shape.

• 17:47Daniel Whiteson?

  So you guys picked these two bits of physics to be sort of strict about. And that really changed like the experience of the characters on the ship and what it's like to live in low G and high G and the societies that form there. But why did you decide, unlike many science fiction writers, to be hardcore about this? Is it because you felt like these it changes the stories and those stories hadn't been told yet?

• 18:06Speaker 06

  Because we had an alien weird that comes through halfway through book one. And if you don't have things grounded before that comes in, then it comes in without any impact. The fact that we had something miraculous and strange happen halfway through the book meant up until then, you couldn't. It's a necessity of the narrative that we approach it that way.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  The best example of that, I think, in in modern fiction is Game of Thrones, George R. Martin's first novel, because it's a fantasy book, but it's not like every other fantasy book. There are no wizards, nobody's casting spells, there's no elves or trolls. It's it's just people. And he seduces you into believing you are reading a medieval history. It's kings and it's and it's princes and it's fighting families and everybody just uses medieval weapons and they live in castles and they ride horses. And and by about the midway point of the book, you could be reading a history of medieval England and I mean, it would feel exactly the same.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  And then just about at the end, Danny Targaryen walks into a fire, holding three rocks. And when the fire goes away, she comes out and she's holding three baby dragons. And it feels amazing. It feels like this miraculous moment, but the only reason it feels like that is because everything up till then has felt like medieval England. And so it feels super weird. If you're writing a story in which, you know, half the people are wizards and they cast fireball spells and the people fly around on flying carpets and three dragons show up at the end, it just feels like, of course, that's what happens. That's, that's just like everything else that happens in the world. To have that dragon moment matter, it has to be weird compared to everything else.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  And so for us to have the arrival of this weird alien technology feel strange, nothing should feel strange up until that point so that that actually matters. Cause if everybody's zipping around with transporters and teleporters and magic technologies, then another magic technology doesn't feel strange.

• 20:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  So then why does Lost fail so badly? So like that, I feel like that's another, it's a series. I've only watched the TV show. I don't even know if it's a book, but like it's meant to be real until the magic comes in, but instead of you feeling like you bought it and now you're in this awesome magical world, it's just like, no, this isn't right. So it seems like it's a hard thing to pull off.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  And, and I'm not a fan of Lost, but I don't, I don't want to just sit and bash on Lost. But, but the reality is it was not a well thought out universe. It wasn't. They wrote an amazing pilot and J.J. Abrams is a fantastic director, shot an amazing pilot. And they kind of had an idea what the first season was about and they kind of had an idea what the show was about. But when it got picked up, they had to write a bunch of scripts. They had to put a first season together. They were coming up with mysteries to keep people interested. And then they got a second season and they had no idea what that was going to be. So they're now they're just making stuff up. And so you're just at that point, they're just sort of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  And because there's no consistency to it, it doesn't feel, I mean, once in our, in our books, when the proto molecule shows up, which is the weird alien technology, it always kind of behaves the same way all the way through. And so each thing it does, you go, yeah, that's what it would do. That's, you know, it feels very consistent. In the lost, it's like there's polar bears and then there's a black smoke monster. And then there's this other thing and then there's the hatch, but the hatch doesn't do what we thought it did. And this need to relentlessly create mystery, but never solve any of them. It's like juggling a thousand balls, but all you do is throw all thousand up in the air at one time. You don't catch any.

• 21:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Absolutely. I feel like the contract between the science fiction writer and the reader is, I'm going to present to you a mystery for which there is a solution that eventually this can all make sense in your mind. If you get to the end of the book and you're like, oh, you were just throwing dragons out every other page and you have no idea what's going on, then I feel betrayed.

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• 23:33Daniel Whiteson?

  So that leads me to ask you guys about your process. How much of the whole series and the whole concept had you mapped out before you started writing, you know, word one of chapter one? Did you outline the entire thing?

• 23:43Speaker 06

  We didn't know that we were going to have a whole series when we wrote the first book. I mean, with the first book, we had, I think, a pretty rigorous outline of what the first book would be. And, you know, we knew what the end of that book was going to be. We knew what the last scene of that book was going to be before we went into at the front. And then for the whole series, actually, that got mapped out during the writing of book two, when it became clear that the publisher was interested in doing a bunch more of these. And at that point, we kind of broad stroked the whole series to the point that we did

• 24:26Speaker 06

  know, you know, Ty pitched the last scene of the last book, the last scene of book nine, while we were about halfway through book two. And that didn't change. So a lot of, a lot of the pathway along the way was not cooked yet, was not identified. But where we were going, we knew early.

• 24:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did you have any moments where you were like, oh crap, how do we get there? Like we've, we've, we've built and maybe now it's not a clear path back anymore? Or just knowing where you're ending up keeps you from having moments like that?

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Not really. I mean, you, you, you talk through how you're going to get there, but I don't think we ever painted ourselves in a corner, which can happen in, in fiction writing. You can, you can create plot points that as you get to the end of the book, you realize, oh, I've screwed myself. The plot points that I have created do not allow me to have the ending that I wanted. I mean, I, I know people who do that, but because we always kind of firmly had a, an end point in mind and we, and we, you know, the two of us plot pretty rigorously and talk through everything, never really wound up getting lost in the weeds.

• 25:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, the metaphor we keep using is a road trip. You know, you're going from New York to Los Angeles. You know where you're going to end up, you know, where you're starting from. You don't know exactly what. Restaurant you're going to stop at, where you're going to get gas, what little side detours you're going to do, but you know, generally speaking, you should probably head west.

• 26:02Daniel Whiteson?

  And what's your process scientifically? It sounds like you guys do a lot of reading. You're smart guys. Do you also talk to scientists? Do you have consultants? Do you do all your own reading and research?

• 26:12Speaker 04

  We had two people, no, there were three times in the writing of nine books that we asked for outside expertise. Daniel had somebody help him figure out a

• 26:22Speaker 06

  Complex physics problem. Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. An acceleration issue with a ship doing something strange and what that was, the experience of being inside the ship would feel like. And then I had to, I had a guy who, you were talking about, you were from Los Alamos, I had a guy from Los Alamos. I asked him the question, if the entire asteroid Eros went up by two degrees, how much energy would that take? And he, and he figured that out. And he gave me the answer in joules and hand grenades. Apparently hand grenade is a unit of measure in, in physics. And then the other one, weirdly that you asked that, is Kelly's husband, Zach helped me with something. I had a question, a

• 27:05Speaker 04

  math question, which was if you have a sphere, a million kilometers across, and on the interface of this sphere, you have rings that are 10,000 kilometers across, and you have 1,173 of those rings, how far apart are they from each other?

• 27:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Zach is smarter than he looks.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  And Zach, it was funny because, you know, I mean, Zach and I were friendly, but we weren't like good. I mean, we had never stayed at each other's house at that point. It was just, you know, we were sort of friendly. We had met a couple of times and we emailed back and forth periodically. And so I sent him this question and his reply after like a day, I thought he was kind of ignoring the email, but a day later, he just wrote back and said, this is not a trivial

• 27:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Why did you send it to Zach? I mean, he's definitely a smart guy, but why?

• 27:54Speaker 04

  Um, because we had talked about some math stuff and I knew he was really into math. And figuring out math problems was a thing that he was into. And so.

• 28:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't remember. Did he get you an answer?

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nice. Way to go.

• 28:10Speaker 06

  We didn't check it. I mean, it might have been wrong. We have no idea.

• 28:14Daniel Whiteson?

  He's been pranking you. Absolutely. Yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 06

  Could be.

• 28:17Daniel Whiteson?

  What was the acceleration problem you were wrestling with?

• 28:20Speaker 06

  If you are in a ship that is accelerating at 2Gs and you have an unbalanced firing of a maneuvering thruster at the nose that puts it into a spin, what does it feel like on the inside? If you are, if you're on that ship, it is spinning while also accelerating at 2Gs. Are you thrown against a wall? Are you, what, what's, what does it feel like? What is, what is the, the lived experience of being in that system?

• 28:55Daniel Whiteson?

  Sounds like a great problem to put on my physics final.

• 28:57Speaker 06

  There, there was a wide variety of opinion.

• 29:00Daniel Whiteson?

  It sounds similar to the scenario of like a fighter pilot doing a loop-de-loop where they feel very different forces at the top of the loop and the bottom of the loop. Because at one point in the loop, gravity is adding to their effective acceleration and the other part of the loop is contrasting.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  Except that you don't actually have that underlying gravity to, to confuse things because you're not on a planet.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  No, but that, but that gravity is being replaced by the, the thrust of the ship.

• 29:25Speaker 06

  No, that, it, yes, there, the gravity exists, but there's not like that, the thing to make one part of the loop feel different from the other part of the loop.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:34Speaker 06

  There's no directional, nothing from a planet.

• 29:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I love the realism of your space scenes because it gets me thinking about the physics and actually reminds me of another book. I don't know if you've read Alistair Reynolds' book, Revenger. He has all these scenes that feel sort of like British naval battles because he's thinking about the kinetics and his ships actually have like huge sails. And I asked him the same question I asked you, which is like, why did you go so hardcore about the physics? His answer was totally different. His answer was like, I actually wanted to write a British naval battle, but my agent said it had to be science fiction. So.

• 30:12Speaker 06

  We all get there through different paths.

• 30:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  What was the hardest part of writing? And what was the hardest part of writing together?

• 30:19Speaker 06

  The hardest part of writing?

• 30:21Speaker 04

  The hardest part of writing is, is, is writing.

• 30:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Parking your ass in a chair and typing.

• 30:27Speaker 06

  The hardest part of writing together? I mean, I, I think, um, this is, this is an emotionally unsatisfying answer to your questions. Cause the, it's all about logistics. It's all about, you know, finding the time, you know? The hardest part of writing is sitting your ass in the chair and actually writing. The hardest part of writing together is working out your schedules so that you're in the same place to have the conversation at the same time when you both have full lives with distractions and event.

• 31:00Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, it's, it would be great if, you know, the hardest part was, you know, the, the having to fine tune your brains in such a way that you can think as one. That's not how it worked.

• 31:12Speaker 06

  Um, it, it was much more, uh, the process is much more like, um, running a small landscaping company than it is like, uh, something high sci-fi and brilliant.

• 31:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I think Shakespeare famously said that also, didn't he?

• 31:26Speaker 04

  No, it was, it was Mark Twain.

• 31:28Daniel Whiteson?

  It's always Mark Twain.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  It's always Mark Twain. No, I, I mean, I think the, the, probably the only frustration that we have is that,

• 31:38Speaker 04

  I am very, very, very lazy and I really want to procrastinate everything. And Daniel actually wants to get things done. So periodically he has to go, hey, so are you going to get that thing done that you said you were going to get done? Maybe we should get something done. So, you know, that's, I am the burden that Daniel's forced to carry.

• 31:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  But you all picked up a new set of books together, right? So like, you couldn't have been that bad of a burden. What, what is the new series you're working on?

• 32:04Speaker 06

  We also very much enjoy getting paid.

• 32:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Some burdens are worth carrying.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  I'm just saying. Uh, now the new series is, uh, It's a very different part of this kind of space opera spectrum. And it was, Ty had this, you know, Ty had the idea for the Expanse. He did all the world building for the Expanse. He did all of the, the kind of groundwork, setting that up. And then he had this other idea that he thought might also be a cool idea for space opera. So now we're doing that one and it's, it's pretty fun. It's pretty good stuff. It's not the same relationship to history that the Expanse had. The Expanse, you could really see where it grew out of our world and how it, it, we, we might plausibly have gotten there. This is more like Dune or Left Hand of Darkness, or something that's just like gazillions of years out and light years away.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  And it lets you approach some very different things.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  But because I'm me, the relationship as to history is it's all based on ancient Babylon.

• 33:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ah, why did you pick that time period?

• 33:05Speaker 04

  I'm a big fan of pre-classical history. And when I was a kid, my parents drug me to church a lot. My parents are very religious and I am the least religious person on the planet. So when I would, when I was there, you know, the only thing you were allowed to have is a Bible and most of that book is very, I don't know if you've read it, but most of it is very boring, very dry. But there's a few books that have some interesting stuff. And one of those is the Book of Daniel, which has like empires conquering and people being drug off as slaves to serve in the Palace of Kings. And I always found that story interesting of like, what if you're just this little agrarian society and the much more technologically advanced Babylonians show up and go, oh, you

• 33:48Speaker 04

  guys all belong to us now and we're going to take a bunch of you as slaves back to Babylon. And some of those slaves will wind up working for the king and in the court of the king as bureaucrats. That just seemed interesting to me. So I wanted to write the sci-fi version.

• 34:00Speaker 06

  And so now we're, we're in the midst of having this human in a very alien framework, a very alien society and figuring, trying to understand his own context and keep himself human while on the one hand, serving and on the other hand, undermining the great nation that has destroyed him and his friends.

• 34:28Daniel Whiteson?

  I love that you guys go into history to find these stories and effectively extrapolate them forward and think about, you know, the economics of a solar system wide society and this kind of stuff. But does doing that change your opinion about it? You know, like after writing The Expanse, are you more or less bullish on asteroid mining or colonies on Ganymede? Are you less likely to invest in a startup that's actually going to do this kind of stuff?

• 34:49Speaker 04

  There's no economic reason to go out into space. There's just, there isn't any. I mean, there's other reasons to go there. There's exploration, learning more about the universe and our place in it. All of those are very good reasons to explore space. And I'm glad that we have a space program. We do that stuff. But there is no reason for people to live on any of those other bodies, other than the all your eggs in one basket argument, which is a valid argument of, you know, what if an asteroid hits Thera and there's no humans left? I would say, though, that if your answer to that is we'll build a city on Mars and there'll be humans on Mars, shortly after the asteroid destroys Earth, all the humans on Mars are just going to die. So, so it's, yeah, you have eggs in another basket, but those eggs are going to expire very quickly. So unless we get

• 35:34Speaker 04

  much, much, much more advanced at like, turning unlivable hunks of rock into livable hunks of rock, we are nowhere near right now. There's just no reason to do that. At that point, you might as well just be building really, really advanced space stations and putting people in those, because you're much more likely to survive in one of those.

• 35:54Speaker 06

  A generation ship in orbit would be a better basket.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a better answer than Mars.

• 35:59Speaker 06

  And I think generally, the experience of having fictionalized these things and talked about them in ways that are compelling and plausible, but not actually grounded in anything, has, I feel like it's helped me understand, like Elon Musk, I think, you know, he's got a lot of great stories on how things are going to work. And I recognize that they're not grounded in anything. And there's a, there's a level of bullshit detection, I think, that comes with having spun up a bunch of your own bullshit.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  I think anybody who's spent any time really thinking about what it would take to colonize Mars sees right through Elon Musk. I can't see you and Zach signing up for the first rocket to Mars, Kelly.

• 36:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, but I also can't see us signing up for the like 1,000th rocket to Mars. We're just not very adventurous people.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Hey, when Mars has like strip malls and movie theaters and all of that, then yeah, sure, I'll go out there for a vacation.

• 37:03Speaker 06

  I will not. I barely want to go to New York. It's a, it's a very long commute.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Daniel is, is a medieval peasant in that he will be born, live his entire life and die within a one mile radius.

• 37:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  And be happy.

• 37:16Speaker 06

  It's, it's not, I'm sure I'm at a mile and a half.

• 37:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, I wouldn't want to leave my bugs, so I get it.

• 37:32Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 38:52Daniel Whiteson?

  So you make a compelling argument that there's no economic reason, but what's your prediction for the future? Do you think 1,000 years from now, 5,000 years from now, humanity has colonized the solar system? Or we're all effectively Daniel and still just living in our own backyard?

• 39:05Speaker 04

  I think it's very optimistic that we're all still around in 1,000 or 5,000 years. But if we are, the one thing, and Daniel, I'm sure will have his own answer for this, but from my perspective, the one thing that science fiction does really, really badly is predict the future.

• 39:19Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  We're good at inspiring, but we're terrible at predicting. And I think anybody who thinks they know what the world's going to look like 1,000 years from now is laughably wrong and probably a little delusional.

• 39:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do you think fiction is usually trying to predict the future, though?

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, some people actually call themselves futurists, who are science fiction writers. And they believe that what they are doing, or what they are attempting to do, is accurately predict these changes. In the near future, you can do some stuff?

• 39:48Speaker 06

  Some.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Even then, look, look how wrong cyberpunk was. You know, we were all reading William Gibson and going, oh, this is amazing, accurate prediction of the future. And then 20 years later, it's laughably silly. And that is often the case with sci fi, where we try to predict what the future is going to look like and then it just looks silly.

• 40:06Speaker 06

  The actual world has a much more kind of florid imagination than any one of us individually.

• 40:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, that brings me to a question I wanted to ask about how you build your universe. You guys are really careful about the gravity and, you know, the kinetic energy and what it's like to fight these battles. But something that would really change those battles are things like, you know, AI controlled drones, where you don't have, you know, delicate meat sacks in every ship in these battles. But you don't see a lot of that in your universe. Was that a conscious choice because it would really change the story? Or was there some other reason for not including that?

• 40:41Speaker 06

  We like writing stories about humans because humans are going to be reading and buying them. So yeah, no, in one of the choices that we made early on was not to include

• 40:57Speaker 06

  the kind of automated space stuff, because once you include that, there is literally no reason to have any people out there.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  And we do, and we do have smart drones for fighting wars. They're called torpedoes. Because there's no reason to build an automated little spaceship and mount a gun on it. Just put a big bomb on the end of it and run into the other guy. And then you just have a torpedo. The idea that there will be like little fighter planes driven by robots shooting at the other ships. Why? Just have it fly into the other ship and explode really big. And then you, you win. And if, you know, if it's, if it's a little robot driving a cheap ship, why put a gun on it? Just have it blow up.

• 41:34Speaker 06

  The thing is, we do have kind of unmentioned expert systems in AI. We do have that kind of, you know, you flick on the light switch and the light comes on level of normalized technology. The only weird that we have is we also kept the meat sex.

• 41:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  So is it difficult when you start working on a TV version of your work? Which, you know, maybe one day will happen with me. Who knows? But like to go in from like, you're completely in control of the narrative to now you're in a writer's room. And it might go in a direction that you hadn't anticipated. What is that experience like?

• 42:08Speaker 06

  It's like having a partner that you're writing with, only there's more people. I mean, we were, we were in a sense, kind of built in the government lab to move into a writer's room. Because we were already in a, an artistic project where none of us totally owned it. Now we just included Noreen and, and Dan Noack and, and Georgia Lee. And all of, all of those other voices became other voices that were also contributing or in, you know, for Noreen in charge.

• 42:42Speaker 06

  But that kind of divesting your ego from the the project had happened for us on day one.

• 42:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's great. I feel like when I work with professors, the more professors that are in the room, the less we get done. And it's, it's great that, I know, I'm sorry, but it's great that you all have managed to be so amazing with so many people working on a project together. Sometimes it makes it harder.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  The thing that is true of a TV show is that it has a showrunner. And they have the final say. If you have a room full of professors and one of them is the boss and gets to tell all the other ones what to do, after the conversation is over, they make a decision, things will get done. It's when nobody's the boss and everybody thinks that their version should be the one that happens, that's when things get done.

• 43:29Speaker 06

  And we got really lucky with our showrunner. We got a guy who was really smart, really invested in the project and probably the best manager that I've worked for in any industry. So, you know, go us.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  He only says that because he never worked for me. That was awesome.

• 43:46Daniel Whiteson?

  What's something that you see in the TV show that's visualized differently than how you imagined it as you were writing it, but that, you know, you're happy about? I don't want you to throw anybody under the bus, but what's something new that came into the visual element of the show that you liked?

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Everything. Daniel and I are not, we are not prop designers. We are not costumers. We are not set builders. So, you know, our, our plan in, in writing books, and this was the way how Daniel basically educated me to do this, is you describe enough that you get the reader to do all the heavy lifting, you get them to imagine the rest of it. You don't give them detailed instructions. You just kind of give them a little, a little hint and then they go imagine the rest. You can't do that in a TV show. You actually have to build things. And so you hire very smart people to do that. You hire prop designers and you hire costumers and you hire set builders and, and production designers and all those people. So, everything they brought was something I hadn't

• 44:43Speaker 04

  thought of before. But in almost every case, it was better than the version I would have done because I'm not a professional at that. So, there was, every day, there was a new thing I hadn't thought of, but I was like, oh yeah, that's great. That's totally what I would have put in the book if I had thought of it.

• 44:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  I had that experience as a reader, too. I read the books. I had everything in my head about how it should look. And then when I watched the TV show, you know, like so often you see it, you're like, oh, that's not really how I imagined it. I'm sort of disappointed. But almost every time I was like, oh, that's even cooler than I had imagined it. That was awesome. Like, it just, the team was so, so incredible.

• 45:17Daniel Whiteson?

  I loved how they really centered the physics. I really felt, of course, when you read the book, you see that it's in there. But when, when you watch the show, you like can see that there's, you know, parabolic motion and they're really considering gravity. And it really, it feels almost like you're in a British naval battle, you know?

• 45:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I like how they really centered an alien being that could sort of mind control. That's, that's what I thought was the cool thing. But I guess we come from different fields.

• 45:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Bring it back to parasites. Everybody sees a part of themselves in it, right?

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Well, Daniel and I are big, big fans of parasites. So.

• 45:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  What's your favorite parasite?

• 45:49Speaker 06

  Talk some Plazugandia.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  I'd go for the classics.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the best one for sure. I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure that the reason that I'm a very aggressive person is because I'm filled with, with cat poop.

• 46:04Speaker 06

  At this point, it's not cat poop. It's just a lot of little cysts in your brain.

• 46:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm actually working on, so one of our next episodes, maybe the one after this one, is going to be about that parasite and mind control and how actually the evidence is really thin for a lot of this stuff. And, and it's like really hard to pull apart. Like, is Ty infected because he's aggressive? Or did the parasite make him aggressive? You don't know. Maybe his aggressive behavior has caused him to encounter the parasite. And there's like a correlation.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  Like I was aggressively owning cats?

• 46:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, sure. Or you were aggressive about not washing your hands after changing the litter box or something.

• 46:42Speaker 06

  If you're just too manly to wash your hands, that's, that's, that's how you get it. All right.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  No, I'm actually, Daniel will attest to this. I'm actually freaked out by people who don't wash their hands.

• 46:51Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  What the hell's wrong with you? Wash your damn hands.

• 46:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. I am the kind of person who, in a restroom, if somebody walks out without washing, I'll be like, oh, gosh, this happens to everyone sometimes. You forgot to wash your hands. And they'll be like,

• 47:04Speaker 06

  Turn around, turn around, you turn around.

• 47:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 06

  I'm a parasitologist. Go wash your hands now.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Do you ever do that? Do you ever say like, look, I'm a parasitologist. Don't make me catalog all the things that are on your hands right now. You should wash those.

• 47:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't say about washing your hands because that's like more bacteria, which is not quite what I do. But I will say, uh, like when we're, you know, eating sushi, I'll be like, I'm a parasitologist. Don't make me catalog all the stuff that's in the raw food that you're eating. Is that Janey? Hi, Janey. Good to see you.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  She didn't know I was going to be talking to you.

• 47:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yay. Oh, I hope I get to see you again soon, Janey. For, yeah, for the, for the folks who aren't watching the video.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  She hopes she gets to see you again soon.

• 47:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, good. All right. Ty's, uh, amazing wife just came by who I talked about at the beginning of the show.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  That's doctor wife to you, man.

• 47:54Speaker 04

  Put a little respect in that.

• 47:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  From, from Oxford, right? Doctor from Oxford.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  No.

• 47:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Cambridge, Cambridge.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  I'm wearing my Cambridge sweater right now, which I did not go to Cambridge, but my wife did.

• 48:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nice. That's close enough. It's all in the family. It's all good.

• 48:07Daniel Whiteson?

  So back to parasites.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I feel like I'm, I don't have a PhD, but I am PhD adjacent. So yeah, I feel like I should get the same respect as if I.

• 48:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Doesn't work that way.

• 48:16Speaker 06

  All but dissertation and classwork. Yeah.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. All but doing any of the work.

• 48:21Daniel Whiteson?

  So back to parasites and the expanse. Did parasites in our actual world inspire the proto molecule behavior at all in your story? Like the mind control aspects of it?

• 48:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 48:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, anytime you start dealing with stuff that's messing with consciousness and repurposing somebody else's body to their own, uh, ends, you're kind of in that, in that playground.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and the proto molecule does, it goes through sort of phases. In the early phase, it is very much a parasite. It is very much a, uh,

• 48:56Speaker 04

  in my sort of original creation of it back before even Daniel showed up. It was sort of a, this weird mix of like Ebola and, um, what's the, what's the mold that grows out of, um, ants heads?

• 49:09Speaker 06

  Cordyceps?

• 49:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Cordyceps. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it was sort of a mix of the two. I had written a short story many, many years ago. Um, one of the scenes takes place in a, uh, health camp where they are treating people who have Ebola. And so I did a bunch of reading about Ebola and there's a phase of Ebola that they call the zombie phase where it has basically melted your brain and you're still ambulatory. So you're sort of wandering around with a melted brain, but you can still walk and your and your stomach, you're vomiting up your stomach lining because your internal organs are melting and the stuff that you vomit up, the black bile that you vomit up

• 49:53Speaker 04

  is the single most infectious substance on earth. If you get that shit on you, you have Ebola. So that always fascinated, the horror of that fascinated me. I'm a horror writer at heart. And then the idea of if, if there was something that infected you and took you through that zombie phase like Ebola does, but it had a purpose, it had, it had a design. There was a, in, it was a goal that it was trying to get to in the way that Cordyceps does with the ants. It infects them, makes them climb up the tree, makes them explode so that they infect other ants. Right. But it has a design. It has a thing that is trying to achieve by taking over the ant. So that combination of it's taking over humans, it's making them very infectious. So the other humans get infected.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  And ultimately, when it has enough infected humans, it's trying to achieve something. I just found that sort of cool and horrifying at the same time. So that was really ultimately where it sort of came from.

• 50:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you, you said this was from a short story?

• 50:48Speaker 04

  The research I did on Ebola.

• 50:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. What's the name of the story?

• 50:52Speaker 04

  And I don't think that one ever got published.

• 50:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  There's an opportunity there, but your story's about parasites should always be published.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  Have you read Peeps? Scott Westerveld?

• 51:04Daniel Whiteson?

  I've eaten peeps. I don't think that counts though.

• 51:07Speaker 06

  Scott Westerveld, who is a lovely writer. I've never met him as a human being. I can't speak to that, but I, but he knows his way around a book, wrote a teenage romance vampire book that is also introductory parasitology.

• 51:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  What? And it's called Peeps?

• 51:24Speaker 06

  Peeps. P E. Yeah. Peeps. Just like, just like the thing. Stands actually, I think in the book for parasite positive.

• 51:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Awesome. I can't wait to check that out.

• 51:33Speaker 06

  It's like if Twilight was being secretly used to teach people science.

• 51:38Daniel Whiteson?

  If only.

• 51:41Speaker 06

  Seriously, it's a great, it's a great little book. I read it to my kid when she was of the age and it stuck.

• 51:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Peeps or Twilight?

• 51:52Speaker 06

  Peeps.

• 51:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Peeps.

• 51:53Speaker 06

  Twilight was not a thing for us.

• 51:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, yeah. My kids aren't old enough for that yet.

• 51:57Speaker 06

  I'm not sure I am.

• 51:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So I'll give you this idea and you know, you just cut me in a little bit when you write the book about it. Parasites that manipulate host behavior, very underrepresented in the literature are the trophically transmitted parasites, sort of like Toxoplasma gondii, but like this fish that I studied that has the brain infecting parasites. Like I found a bunch of like viruses where it's transmitted from one person to another, where you bite each other, but not a lot of these trophically transmitted things. And I, you know, there's a real opportunity there. There's some of the best zombi makers out there.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  I don't know what trophically transmitted.

• 52:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I should have said, yeah, sorry. That's good. So trophically transmitted means it goes from like when one, when a predator eats something else. So for example, when those rodents that are attracted to the smell of cat urine, I'm a science communicator, but I'm awful at identifying my own ecology jargon. But so like when a mouse is attracted to the smell of cat urine and the cat eats it and then gets infected, that's trophic transmission. And I studied a fish with a brain infecting parasite. And when a bird eats the fish, that's how it gets transmitted up the trophic levels.

• 53:01Speaker 06

  And this is when you stopped eating sushi. This is, I'm guessing.

• 53:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  That was when I stopped eating sushi. That or when I had this job where over the summer I had to jump into dump trucks full of dead fish. That put me off of fish also.

• 53:11Speaker 06

  I can see that.

• 53:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  It was my worst job.

• 53:14Speaker 06

  That seems legit.

• 53:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Can I ask one more physics question? Since we've been talking about cat piss and rats for a minute. I was really interested in this Epstein drive. I love that you guys invented a scientist who came up with this new drive. How much did you think through the physics of the Epstein drive, this fusion powered drive that, that moves so many of your ships through the solar system?

• 53:34Speaker 04

  It is based on a paper I read many years ago about a way to maximize, I mean, because you can't get around the rocket equation. You have to throw something out the back of the ship. You have to. And that is the problem. And I had read a paper many, I might have been in Omni or a similar magazine way back in the day of a way to take the exhaust and throw it. Almost at light speed, like throw it so hard at the back of the ship that even tiny amounts of matter are imparting a lot of thrust. And I just sort of stole that idea. Physically, it doesn't actually work. It doesn't make any sense. Your ship would just melt from the heat. If you're generating that much energy in a fusion reactor in the middle of your ship,

• 54:18Speaker 04

  you have to have a way to get rid of that heat. And, you know, we're, we just sort of go, eh, the heat is fixed. There's a heat solution. They invented it. Thank God, we invented the heat machine. But other than that, I mean, the, the physics behind throwing stuff out the back of the ship really, really hard, those make sense.

• 54:38Speaker 06

  And we're not ever gonna like, say what paper that was. So that when it was discredited, we're not, we're not take, we're not taken down with it. But

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Plus, I probably misunderstood everything the guy said. He would probably be, or he or she would probably be very offended that I had used their paper to create my terrible fictional spaceship engine.

• 55:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, before I was a particle physicist, I was actually a budding young plasma physicist, and I worked in a plasma physics group in your backyard, Daniel, in Los Alamos. And there's a guy there, Glenn Worden, who's a plasma physicist, who's been writing a series of papers about how plasma powered engines are the only way we could ever like intercept an asteroid or get around the solar system. So I think you guys were ahead of your time. The science is now catching up to you.

• 55:23Speaker 06

  Well, this is, this is one of those things where when you're vague enough, you get to take credit for everything.

• 55:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Writing advice. On that note, we're gonna wrap things up. You told us a little bit about the history behind your new book, but I don't think you ever said the name of your new book.

• 55:42Speaker 06

  The new book is The Mercy of Gods. It's the first in a trilogy called The Captives' War.

• 55:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  And are they gonna come out one year at a time or something like that?

• 55:52Speaker 06

  If I can get Ty to sit in the goddamn chair, yes.

• 55:56Daniel Whiteson?

  It stops wasting time on podcasts and does some writing.

• 56:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, we hope you're successful with that, Daniel. And, and good luck to both of you. And thank you so much for being on the show. I had a lot of fun.

• 56:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 56:19Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 56:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 56:32Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 56:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 56:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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• 58:58Speaker 02

  Work lives on.

• 59:01Daniel Whiteson?

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• 59:32Daniel Whiteson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.