Bonus! Science Fiction and Fantasy Concepts Draft (with Dan, Emmanuel, and Kalin)

Hey there, everybody. Finishing off the year here with what I hope is a fun episode in which I'm going to emulate my favorite podcast, The Incomparable, and do a draft. So I've assembled a small group of people from the Nebulugo... book club discord server, which I feel like I'm starting to sound like a broken record about it because I think I've mentioned it on several of the last episodes that I've done.

So it's going to be a four person draft. I'm going to go last. And then there's three others who I will introduce in the order in which they will draft. The draft order determined in true incomparable fashion by random.org, which I'm given to understand that they bring the random to you.

And incomparable listeners will understand that and hear the jingle. So, guys, as I introduce you, go ahead and tell us your Discord handle for the other Discordites who are listening at home. So let's go ahead and start with Dan. Hi, I'm SD Woodchuck on the WLUGO Discord. Awesome. And then Emmanuel, you may recognize his voice. Hello, I'm Emmanuel, commander on the WLUGO Discord. Yes. And finally, Caelan. Yeah.

My name is Caelan, and I'm also just Caelan on the Nebuligo Discord server. Excellent. Just kept my name there. Yeah.

Okay, so for this draft, you know, some people decide to go with super specific stuff. And I decided let's stay as broad as possible. And I feel like I need to apologize in advance. Because when you have all of science fiction and fantasy to choose from, it's...

really kind of hard to narrow down to just a few things. But that is what we're doing here. We're going to be drafting science fiction and fantasy concepts. So that's quite broad. And I had to do a lot of... clarifying over email once i had assembled the crew here so we'll go around a few times see how many rounds we get in

And after everybody's pick, we can do a little discussion if other people want to comment on it. And at the end, we'll do a kind of a bring out your dead round. So if you've got stuff left on your list that you want to really, really briefly hit, then we can do that as well. So what is a science fiction and fantasy concept? Yeah, we're going to find out. I think the main idea is that each person is going to kind of name a concept.

in a broader form and then zoom down to something more specific. And the idea is to give reading or viewing recommendations for all of them. I think we're all from a book club, so those would probably end up. being books okay real quick before before we go on i was going to ask all of you if you had an opening statement if you had something that introduced your list um then that was fine but it's totally optional so so dan if you have anything like that

Sure. I think for myself, I tend to lean more toward the weird in science fiction. And I think part of it is that it gives you a way to look at your own reactions to things, to think about the ways you... perceive the world as different and strange and in a way it's almost like brute forcing empathy you're you're being put in a situation that is so foreign that in order to

To engage with the work at all, you have to set aside a lot of your biases, a lot of your nature to sort of revulsion at things that are other. And by doing that, you expand what you are willing to accept.

Cool. All right. All right. Yeah. My first one is the idea of merged consciousness, specifically when you have two or more personalities occupying the same mind. Okay. It's a popular one, especially in weird fiction. But a lot of times it's one that you can't really get into without spoiling the work. So my specific example is from Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers. And I chose it because it is almost the central conceit of the work.

in a few different few different ways the protagonist is a woman who is two different personalities in one one person she has the memories of one but the actual drive of the other And as the story is progressing, she's kind of merging into a synthesis of the two. But she's also partnered up with a man who's four separate personalities that are complementing each other.

Not exactly the villain of the novel, but there is kind of an antagonist, is also a much larger scale merged consciousness where the entire population of the planet Earth... has been cybernetically linked as one sort of hive mind. I like it. That's very cool. And yeah, that's one that I've definitely seen a lot of different implementations of that where you have multiple...

beings merged into one consciousness. You're talking about two consciousnesses inside one person. Yeah. In this case specifically, Like I said, there's other examples that I think are more prominent, but harder to go into without spoiling the work. Right, right. All right. Sounds good. Anything from the other two guys? Well, I think I know which title he meant when he said he would spoil the work. It's a recent Hugo winner. I mean, the only thing that comes to mind for me is there's a kind of...

potentially more popular trope of two minds inhabiting one body. I don't know if I've ever even encountered that, so I'm going to have to follow you up on that recommendation. Yeah, yeah. That's the whole purpose here, right? We're going to blow up people's TBR piles.

As if any of us needed that, right? You know, one of the fun things on the discord is just seeing what everybody's reading. And I'm like, I can't possibly keep up with all of this. And, and like, I get a new reading recommendation every day there. So, yeah. All right.

Emmanuel, you're up. So me, it's more of an approach to science fiction that I enjoy. I find that science fiction is great at exploring the perception of others. Because science fiction... as a genre externalizes our moral dilemmas, and it lets us look at ourselves through alien eyes. And these works, they ask, what do we see when we meet the other?

And in that moment, what do we learn about ourselves? And I think science fiction does that better than any other genre. Yeah. So do you have a theme for your entire list? I have like a main theme and then a lot of smaller ones. Okay, nice. Awesome. And so it could be aliens, could be altered humans, could be future societies, and there are tools that help us see our blind spots.

So how we treat difference, it reveals our values, our fears, our capacity for empathy. And science fiction doesn't ask us to imagine better futures. It asks us to become better.

perceivers of the moment. And I'm thinking of works like The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin, Flowers for Organon, also, we could... going to that the culture series of iron banks and more titles that have explored this question of the order in science fiction with all of them have their own approach of course but they all beg the same question which i find

is better explored, as I said, in science fiction than other genres. It used to be more in the tales, philosophical tales, something I studied back when I did literature. And I find that you don't get that in mysteries or crime novels or romance as much anyway as you do in science fiction and fantasy, especially science fiction. And we can apply that to everyday life, which I find fascinating.

Okay, so you kind of gave a hint as to some of your picks, so you want to pick one for your first? Yes, sure. So I was thinking of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is one of the classics. Le Guin is one of the most famous science fiction author, both for her ideas and her prose. And the core idea here is that this mutual misunderstanding between worlds is a mirror for otherness. Because Le Guin wants to show us...

that we fear others, but it's a projection of our own fear. We should try to understand. We don't have to agree with everything, but we should try to understand the other instead of saying they're... bad because they're different it's very dumb i'm dumbing it down but that's the core idea and she explores how ideology distorts empathy she explores how language and culture and power dynamics play with our understanding of the other in a way that is i find really riveting

Well, in that one in particular, the idea of even using a word like... archists instead of anarchists. Because there's some words you never hear the opposite of. And so to flip that around from the perspective of the anarchist was really interesting.

And what is funny is that both societies, you have this very capitalist society and this anarchist society, and they both see each other as barbarians, basically. So they're both wrong. And they're bound, but... by you know human limitations in a way but what we call the human nature what is basically a cultural setup it doesn't have anything to do with biology so it's we call it human nature but it's not natural it's really a setup it's how we

evolve as a society. And this book does a great job at making, at showing you how it could go wrong, but also how it could go right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh, Kalen, you're up next. Sure.

I would say having kind of looked over my list that I really approached this little project as thinking about specific hypotheticals or specific technologies. that really have stuck with me after reading them that really um for one reason or another um are things that i keep coming back to when i think about the special role that science fiction has in imagining what could be different either about the human being or about human culture in society.

I have kind of a few different examples. My main examples are related to those two things, like what's different about the human being and then more sociological broad-based.

picks because that's the sort of science fiction i gravitate towards cool all right so yeah so my first pick is the concept of human modification um and You know, not necessarily thinking of it in terms of any sort of transhumanist cyberpunk type thing, but just how could technological breakthroughs change the way that humans... practice medicine, for example, or practice basic bodily functions or cognitive behavior. And so one example that I always think about.

is Ted Chiang's story, Liking What You See, a documentary, which features a central technological what-if called Caliognosia. And this is a medical procedure, a non-invasive medical procedure that is introduced to society that when undertaken can eliminate the beauty bias in someone's perception. so that when you are interacting with somebody, you are not relating to them depending on whether you perceive any sort of physical attraction, physical aesthetic.

perfection or disperfection. And when I was first reading this story, there was some deep-rooted part of me that just kind of went, I want this. I must have this. And I've never had this sense of kind of personal envy for a technological breakthrough from a science fiction story. I had never really sat back and thought about it, but when I did, thanks to this story, I was like, I would really appreciate being able to turn that part of my cognitive perception off and just go through the world.

being able to interact with people based on how they interact with people, who they are as a person rather than the way that my own brain gets warped by the aesthetics of the human face. And so whenever anybody asks me a question like, if there's something from science fiction that you would want to adopt in your own life, I'm like...

This, this one is when I go back to, you know, that's really, that's my self-aware pick too. Right. Right. In terms of like, it says something positive about your personality that you're like, yeah, limiting bias would be great. And, and there's so many different kinds of it.

Yeah. Okay. I guess it's my turn. So I'm going to go, I think the category for mine would probably be called galactic geography, if that makes sense, galactic structure, because I'm going to go with the zones of thought. best exemplified in Werner Vinge's series that includes a fire upon the deep and a deepness in the sky. And I just love this concept. The idea is that the Milky Way galaxy is broken up into four kind of concentric sphere zones. Are they natural? Are they artificial?

Who knows? I'm not sure if we ever learn in the series. I haven't read all the books, so maybe we'll find that out. But the idea is that the different zones have different physical laws that directly affect intelligence. or artificial intelligence. And so movement near the zone borders is very high stakes because you could accidentally fall into a lower zone and that would have consequences for your technology and your own intelligence.

Because the most primitive zone is the unthinking depths, which is near the galactic center, where only minimal forms of intelligence are even possible. So no machine intelligence of any kind, no higher... biological intelligence either so in essence like if you're if you were in a spaceship a starship and it strayed into the unthinking depths then uh it would stop working but you wouldn't be intelligent enough to notice so and a lot of

more intelligent species would just die because the brain power that they would lose would cause them to cease to function. And then moving up from there is the slowness where... earth evidently was this there's no faster than light travel no faster than light communication nothing like a true artificial intelligence um and then

Up beyond that is the beyond, and that's where you have AI, you have faster than light travel, faster than light communication as well. And then above that and beyond that is the transcend where these... only these super intelligent beings dwell. And I just love the whole concept of it, and especially the idea that the borders can sometimes move. And so that has real stakes. So if you're in the beyond, but down near the slowness, you need to make sure that you have backup.

drive systems in case your FTL goes offline because you go over the border. You might need hibernation pods to weather that journey back into the beyond. So yeah, really, really cool. And I don't know, I'll ask you guys because I'm... imagining that you're better read than I am. Is there anything like this in other fiction? Yes, in the Culture Series, INM Banks, because you have those AIs and there's a concept of subliming.

some AIs can evolve above a certain level. Okay. And they don't really become deity. They just go on another level. They're not among us anymore. So it's kind of the same idea. Except there is no slow zone. It's basically the normal zone and then subliming. But it's in the same core idea, if you will. Okay. I was just reminded in my own mind, my sister was telling me about a book that she read where...

Earth goes through phases where magic or science is predominant. And so if you're a powerful mage, when the switchover happens, all of a sudden you can't do magic anymore. I thought we were going to talk about a US election. Yeah. I don't know what book it was. I'll have to ask her if I can find out what the book was. I'll put it in the show notes. Okay. That's one round done, guys. Well done. Excellent. We will go ahead and head back up to the top.

And Dan, your next pick. All right. Well, my next pick is going to be something that's much more of a... There is a broader trope to it that I think we all recognize, and it is the... The imposter, the alien imposter, basically. The thing that is able to look and sound and behave like a human, but isn't. Did you purposely say the thing? Right there. I didn't, but that is a great example. But I'm kind of flipping it on its head by choosing a specific example that changes the dynamic a little bit.

And I'm specifically talking about Vale's hypothesis in Gene Wolfe's Fifth Head of Cerberus. And if you're unfamiliar with the book, Fifth Head of Cerberus is, it was originally a novella, and then it was expanded into three sort of interlinked novellas. They're built around a story that takes place on a colony world where the official story is that the shape-shifting natives were all wiped out when humanity came.

But there's an anthropologist named Dr. Vale who has hypothesized that actually the first colonists were murdered by the shape-shifting natives and replaced. and replaced so convincingly that they have forgotten themselves who they are, so that these impostors are integrated with society in a way that nobody can pick up on. That's really interesting.

And it sounds like I am spoiling the actual plot of the book by pointing this out, but you're actually introduced to the hypothesis early on. And it doesn't use it for a really simple sort of us versus them narrative. It kind of sets you up for that trap.

But really what it's doing is it's kind of introducing this as a way to explore the gradients between us and them, where what's making them so... so intimidating is that they have in a lot of ways taken on our own characteristics but lost their own um the more they are themselves the less intimidating they are but the more they are like us that's scary you know um

And similarly, the notion that individuals can't be 100% sure, because if the imitation is such that you forget who you are, the individuals can't be sure that they are human versus... the aboriginal aboriginal natives and that that's a that's a trope that could it doesn't necessarily need to be the alien imposter as well it could be a a form of human imposter i think the the kind of

anxiety underpinning that kind of story is reinforcing the boundary between us and them. A new release that comes to mind is the second most recent novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I mean, he publishes frequently enough that it might not even be the second most recent anymore. But Saturation Point came out last year, which focuses on... It's kind of like a climate apocalypse story where, to get into spoilers a little bit in case you don't want to hear the ending resolution of this story.

There's an exclusion zone that the main characters go into and fail to survive, and they think that it's because of natural reasons, but it's actually because the experiments have been done there.

genetic engineering a group of humans that can tolerate the radically altered climate zones that are kind of beginning to colonize the temperate zones of the globe and and those people have planned a sort of takeover of the earth from homo sapiens and have infiltrated out into into the society and can't be detected and so there's that same similar sort of you know imposter anxiety

I love that notion of they're so deep into it that they don't even know anymore, right? The line isn't there for them. Yeah, and I think what really makes that stand out in Fifth Head of Cerberus is that... They are the natives. The humans are actually the invaders here. So there's almost a sense of justice to it, but at the same time, it's written from the perspective of people who at least believe they're people. Yeah, a non-book kind of...

Similar thing is the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, where you have certain of the Cylons that are sleeper agents. They don't know that they're Cylons. And then when they discovered that they are, they're sort of institutionalized. kind of rejecting their Cylon heritage. And then you find out that there's a whole cycle of these things happening over and over. And it's interesting stuff. Okay, Emmanuel, your second pick.

Yes, so I'm keeping the same broad theme, but in a completely different approach, would be with Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. And the main focus here would be on human dignity. And it touches on what... Colin was talking about earlier about what technology can bring to us as a species and how it could be powerful but also dangerous in some circumstances because spoiler alert the main character Charlie

is an individual with intellectual disability and then he gets operated on and becomes basically a genius. And in both states, people treat him with cruelty. I find in that book, just in different ways. And the important lesson in that book is not about intelligence. It's really about how we assign value to people and how we judge people. And if...

The intelligence of somebody changes how we treat them. What does it say about our ethics? What does it say about us? And, you know, dignity is not earned through. is earned through humanity. Just the fact that you are a human being is enough for you to have your dignity. You should not have to reach a certain level. And this book, which I really highly recommend, is truly an extraordinary work, in my opinion.

It gives you the, how can I put it? It tells the uncomfortable truth that at different moments in your life, you can become that other in front of somebody else's. you will have to deal with that and you will be judged and you have to think about that whole process and that novel explores this in a remarkable way with that just small twist at the beginning that you have a way of operating on somebody

And in this book, he is disabled, then becomes a genius, and then slowly becomes back what he was at the very beginning. He becomes somebody with an intellectual disability. heartbreaking in that novel but also very enlightening because you see how he perceives himself you see how others perceive him and it's done in a truly abundant way in that in that novel yeah

I've only ever read the novella. I haven't actually read the full novel. So it's on my list to get to in the short term. Yeah, it's interesting to me because Florence for Algernon is probably the... the nebula winner that is furthest back that i've read furthest ago uh more than 25 years ago i would have read it and i have a memory of it that is is basically complete but is also

you know, a very young man's memory of that book. So it's interesting to hear somebody talk about it from a more mature perspective than the one that I'm drawing from having read it so long ago. It's one that I've had marked as needing to be reread sometime in the near future. I never seem to get around to it, but...

That's one reason why I probably should reread it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and Emmanuel too, in that, when you were talking about, you know, the kind of victimhood and, you know, being a perpetrator and the victim and you can. When you're reading something like, I think, Flowers for Algernon, you can see yourself in the characters and say, oh, I've said things like that. I've done things like that. And it can really, I don't know, from a...

Christian-ese kind of thing. Oh, that's very convicting, right? That I see that in myself. And that book definitely brought some of those feelings out for me. And I think that's kind of going to what you're saying, Dan. It's like reading at a certain age, you're going to pick more.

up on those things because you have more life behind you. Absolutely, yeah. Okay, Kalen, second pick. So I'm going to continue with the kind of broader theme of human modification for this one, but focus more on... the idea of unintended consequences of technology. And my reading pick to talk about the unintended consequences is a trilogy of

kind of space opera-y hard sci-fi called The Quantum Evolution by Derek Kunzkin, who's a Canadian author. It starts with The Quantum Magician. And this is a kind of... far future space-faring story in which humans have spread out through a few different wormhole discoveries from the solar system into other star systems and in order to

settle on different worlds have engaged in some pretty far-reaching human bioengineering and genetic engineering. But then there are other instances in which different sorts of power and political and academic interests come into play in terms of what bioengineering is actually undertaken. there's this very fascinating and incredibly creepy society in this trilogy of novels where a certain group of

I think the implication is that they're sort of libertarian capitalists who decide that they want to create themselves a permanent servant class. And so they... They want to maintain a kind of minority elite on top in a broader serving class through genetically engineering the serving class to be religiously devoted to... to them through a kind of pheromone and biological link process. And what ends up happening, this is not a spoiler because this is...

It's sort of like a society that our characters interact with over the course of the stories. But what ends up happening is the elite gods of this society end up... creating such a powerful religious fervor in the serving class that the servants cannot abide any possibility that they will not be in control of when they have access to. their deities, and there's a revolution that takes place. And essentially, the elite of this society are enslaved for the purposes of religious devotion.

Every time our characters, like the main characters of these stories, have to interact with the society that was called the puppets. they are just the creepiest people and i have never been able to forget how how creepy it felt to lead them um and the way that they the way that they interact with others the way that they protect their society the way that they talk about the kind of god, they're god people in the way that they keep them contained. It's a fantastic series.

It's not the only case in which unintended consequences play out in terms of human development. The main character is a part of a quantum project, a quantum mathematics project.

essentially trying to develop a personality-free consciousness that is able to engage in mathematical theorizing. And initially this... projects was sequestered in an academic study, but as soon as that broke out into deal you know these people interacting with human affairs affairs of state war um and commerce and things like that it suddenly

All of the basis, the foundations of this society that had been created among these star systems was absolutely threatened by the ability of these quantum humans, essentially. And yeah, it really twists their ability to predict what's going to happen. Yeah, I highly recommend the series The Quantum Magician. post-human space opera heist novel with a bunch of weird characters and weird societies and um yeah so i feel like i went on a little too long there but i apologize

But that's, yeah, I wanted to explain why I picked that. I really like that idea as well, specifically the self-made gods sort of becoming prisoners. That's a really satisfying kind of inversion of... negative intent having negative consequences for the person blowing up in their own face. I think that's a very satisfying way for that to play out.

It reminded, when you were first talking about it, Caelan, it reminded me of the Vorta and the Jem'Hadar from Deep Space Nine, where they have this religious... understanding of the founders, the shapeshifters. And that affects the way all the kind of politics works in the Dominion. I'm going to try not to have a TV reference for every one of these, but no promises. I think I'm up next. Yep. Yep.

Okay, so then my next one is, the broad category is fantasy cosmology slash pantheons. And so I want to talk about World of the Five Gods from the Lois McMaster Bujold series that includes... Paladin of Souls, The Curse of Chalion, and the Penric and Desdemona books. I really, really enjoy the series. So the idea is, in this world, there are five gods, and everybody knows they're real.

They're known as the father, the mother, the daughter, the son, and the bastard. And the thing that I think is so intelligent about the way Bujold draws this is that the... kind of orthodox people in this world are known as Quintarians, where they acknowledge all five deities.

But there's a group that subscribes to what they call the quadrine heresy, in which the bastard is not honored as a deity, but seen as a demon. And as a religious person myself, I think it's very astute to understand that religious people... like almost nothing more than disagreeing with one another. And the idea that you could have a world where everybody agreed on the same thing from a theological perspective is ridiculous.

I'm surprised they even agree on the four. But I also really enjoy in the series that the five gods don't intervene directly. Instead, they kind of... influence people through visions, through dreams, to act on their behalf, with the possible exception of the bastard, because the bastard is in charge of the demons, and the demons can help people do sorcery. They're not demons in the kind of...

Milton concept of demons or the Judeo-Christian kind of concept of demons. They're chaos forces that kind of do what they want. So the reading recommendations are kind of... built into this one there aren't that many books in the series um in terms of the the main series in there there's the hallowed hunt the curse of chalyon and

Paladin of Souls. And then the Pendrick and Desdemona series is a lot of fun. They're all novellas, I believe, at this point. And there's a lot of them. And so they're an easy way in. So I think that would be where I'd tell people to start if they want to kind of...

dip their toes into it. But another fun thing about it is that each book in the series kind of dwells on one of the deities. So I'm hoping that we eventually get another one. And one nice thing also is that visual is just a pleasure to read so even if you're not a fantasy fan which I'm not I did read some of those books and I really enjoy them because you know they're a gateway drug into fantasy even if you

Don't like fantasy. Yeah, yeah. It's funny. When I talk about not loving fantasy, it's usually world building that I don't like. And cosmology is definitely part of world building. But that's an aspect that I've really started to enjoy. is a well-crafted cosmology. Yeah, I think that I agree with you that world building, when it feels very sort of self-serving...

gets to be kind of old, but when it really feels like it's in service to the story, when it's really building on the themes of the story, there's nothing like it. Yeah. And Bujol's really good with characters, right? And so everything is told from those clear character viewpoints, and that really helps. It's an exercise in good... balance. It's not easy to do because as an author, I can imagine you want to explore the world that you've created.

But if you're just standing there watching that world unfold and nothing happens in it, okay, thank you. I appreciate that, but move on, please. And she does that. Well, I mean, one of the things, if I can speak to your pick. One of the things that I've really loved about that particular pantheon is how it doesn't create necessarily easy or...

straightforward allegiances for characters who are trying to navigate their own lives. And if I were to compare it to a series that I love, The Wheel of Time, but... always found that the cosmology there was a little bit simplistic and that there's a light one and a dark one and it's very uh it's very straightforward who the heroes are going to be because the heroes are not going to be for the dark one

And even when I was younger and reading through those books, I always struggled to really get behind the idea that people would knowingly... choose between such a simple dichotomy. And so the complexity of Bujold's cosmology in that way was a real delight.

to explore. Yeah, that's an excellent point. All right, back up to the top of the order. Dan, you're up. Okay, I'm going to go with something just a little bit more whimsical this time. Okay. If you want to take the general concept, I'm thinking more of supernatural temptation. But the specific example is going to be the carousel in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

If you've never read the novel, it's very evocative of the fall, of fall season. It takes place in a small town, small Midwest town. And a carnival is coming to town very late in the season. There's two boys who live in town named Will and Jim, and they're at just that right age where they're not.

They're not adults yet, but they can smell it. It's right around the corner for them, and they're eager for that change, and they're just not there yet. And something about the carnival draws them in with that as the hook. And it winds up being not just them, but the entire town drawn in. And it's the carousel specifically that is kind of the vortex that has grabbed the town's imagination.

The method that it works by is by touching on the fact that everybody is not the age they want to be. The older citizens in town... seeing the carousel a way for them to become younger. And it physically does this. If it's going one direction, it will take years off your life for every spin. Whereas the two boys, they want to be older. And for them, it's a way for them to... sort of cheat time and get ahead to move ahead to the age that they're anticipating. But the carnival...

Mr. Kruger and Mr. Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, as you might suspect, is kind of evil. And it uses this desire, this temptation to... consume something from the patrons who choose to ride the carousel. But they have to choose. It's not something that they can just take you and force you to ride it. The customer has to make that choice. to step onto the carousel to to to choose that shortcut and it it really works well in in tapping into what makes each character want that change

Not necessarily for selfish reasons. Will's father, you're told from very early on that he had kids late in life. He's much older than his son. much further out of step than most fathers are with their children. And he's always thinking how much easier it would be, how much more of a connection he would have if he was just that little bit younger to be closer to his son's age.

There's that temptation. There's the way that can happen, but it's also not the right way. And it is such an effective means of temptation for that novel. It just works really well to grab the audience and drive the point home. Great pick. Bradbury's prose, too, just the way he writes. When you were talking about that, I was like, I feel like I can smell popcorn and licorice. Exactly. I have the same sensory response to certain prose with Bradbury. Yeah, the false sense.

The ozone in the air from lightning strikes. I haven't been close to lightning in years, but I have that experience just encoded on my brain. All right.

Emmanuel, your third pick. So I'm going to go with a good old classic concept in science fiction, which is uplifting. You successfully sniped me, Emmanuel. Did I? Me too, actually. Well, it's not an original one, but it's an interesting one. And I look at it from two different angles. And the book I chose to talk about it, not original either, is Star Tide Rising from David Brin, which is part of a series.

And in that book, humans uplift dolphins, which I know threw you off, Seth, at the time. Yes. And at first I was kicked. skeptical also but I did enjoy that book very much because it asks the right questions I find basically is uplifting other species an act of generosity arrogance or long-term exploitation. Because it's quite complex. Because in this series and in others also, uplifting creates a permanent debt.

The uplifted species owes allegiance to the uplifter. And also intelligence does have a burden. It brings anxiety, obligation, hierarchy, and... Inside that, the freedom is conditional, whereas before dolphins are totally free to be dolphins. They don't have that burden to carry. So in the context of such a species, is intelligence a gift or an imposition?

compared to what they had before, the life that they had before. And it asks, you know, a few questions where a consciousness like this is a liberation or it's a responsibility forced on others. And I could ask all of you the question, do we have the right? to make others like us just because we can. For those who watch more TV, you can think about Star Trek and the first directive, for example. We can't interfere with people below a certain...

technological level. It's kind of the same concept, if you will. And also, to me, as you know, I'm a historian. It echoed with colonization. Because certainly colonizing powers saw themselves as uplifters. They saw themselves as superior to the people that were colonizing. Yeah, we're bringing civilization. Yeah, exactly. And they said to these people, we're better than you, we're gonna...

teach you and you're going to thank you for it, which is total BS. Meanwhile, we're going to stamp out your languages and your religion. We're going to do that. And take your land.

exactly take your land and your riches uh and then you you better be thankful for that and it's uh something that touches me directly you know as you know i'm french we did that too good chunk of the world and uh and i still know people who think it was a good thing to do you know that the french would did good and like no

They did that to enrich themselves. You know, end of story. Maybe some people in that context or in the sci-fi books think they're doing good. They do it, you know, earnestly. But in the end, it's exploitation. however you turn it around. And I find that the concept of uplifting in science fiction is a good way to explore that, how we impose ourselves and our values upon others.

That happens all the time. I mean, I'm French, but I live in Canada. The land and everything that has been taken away from native people. You're in the States. You have exactly the same issue. I'm in Hawaii. Exactly. And some people acknowledge that and some don't. And I recall when I was listening to your podcast, Seth, you mentioned at some point a colleague of yours that did not understood why you read fiction.

He just read mechanical stuff or technical stuff and never fiction. And I like to think in science fiction, just a small parenthesis, science fiction is a great tool for that. Reading nonfiction is great. to work and to do a lot of things but it doesn't teach you how to think reading fiction trains your brain how to think how to react how to understand because it's good to have a lot of data but if you don't know how to process it

with intelligence and insight, it's useless. You're becoming a human chat GPT if you do that. You know, chat GPT can't understand feelings. It can't understand morality. It will just, you know, grab it and yank it back at you, which is what somebody that just read nonfiction would do. And reading those concepts, learning about them in science fiction, understanding all that uplifting is made of.

is, I think, really rewarding for the reader. Yeah, it's interesting that people might not have expected to find Uplift on my list, given that I was not a huge fan of those books. But the concept alone... is fantastic. And so even if I bounced off the books a little bit, I still think that the concept is brilliant. And he hangs a lot of philosophy and other...

themes on it as well. The next book in the series... I was just going to ask if he had the same example for that pick. Was it the David Bray novels? It was, yeah. I did note down that there are, I'm reading the latest Old Man's War novel, and there's Uplift there as well, which is interesting. But yeah, do you have another one, Caitlin? All right. Well, the more contemporary uplift novels that I would kind of go to as like this...

The 21st century standard is Children of Time, the Adrian Tchaikovsky novels and its sequels. But I don't think it approaches the same... questions, or at least in the same way as what Emmanuel is describing of the David Ring ones, which I haven't yet read to my great shame. Yeah, I agree. In fact, I think that Tchaikovsky's kind of... kind of flips that dynamic as well um again kind of kind of touching on spoilers but in a big way it's you know we uplift these other species but

In the end, they wind up being better at some things than we are, and they uplift us in turn to have us be more cooperative than we are normally capable of. That's a series that I need to get to. I started reading Children of Time a while back and I got, I don't know, 20% into it or so, maybe just 10%. Other stuff got in the way, and I'm like, I really want to get back to that. So I'm just going to have to do it on audio just so I can run through it. Savor it.

And I was like, I knew I just don't have the time to enjoy this the way I need to. So. Yeah, one of these times I'll build myself a backlog so I can get some extra reading cycles. So this is part of it. So thanks, guys. And no need to be ashamed of anything. I haven't read any Tchaikovsky yet. So, you know, we all have our demons.

books that we must get to at some point. I did meet him at Worldcon in 2024, which is very cool. I mentioned that you sniped me as well. I was going to use both Bryn and Tchaikovsky as an example, but kind of a tangential example where in my case, it was going to be examples of cases where humanity isn't really top dog. I think in a lot of science fiction, we are, we at least position ourselves as the dominant force. And sometimes we come into opposition with things.

bigger than us but it's rare that we're in cooperation with other species and not as the you know the figurehead the leader and both of those are cases where humanity has a a significant presence but we're not necessarily the, we're not the king of the hill. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Kalen, I think you're up. Yeah. Okay. So my third one is, is looking at.

the way that science fiction can explore different ways of organizing polities or societies, different forms of social organization. And I don't have like a... two-word summary for that concept. But when I was thinking about it, I was thinking of the Ursula Gwynn speech, the National Book Award speech that's been quoted significantly since...

She gave it. And in particular, one of the lines where she says that hard times are coming when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now. Emmanuel brought up the dispossessed, which is one of the classic examples of looking at two different potentially polar opposite societies and visions for how humans can organize themselves.

But more contemporarily, the one that I really wanted to highlight as something that just blew me away was the Terra Ignata series by Ada Palmer, which starts with Two Like the Lightning. Because it is a book that really dives into the idea of exploring a plausible future evolution of our political organization at a global level. And based on advances in technology that trivialize our ability to travel across the globe.

She hypothesizes about assuming that geography is not destiny. What is the social unit of organization at a... that would replace the idea of a nation state. A nation state of people that come together to form a government because by accident all the people surrounding each other in that area.

forms a country, a nation. And so in this future history that she develops after technological advances, after... global conflict and and political reforms that follow that the concept of hives are are kind of evolve and develop which are these non-geographical nations that have voluntary citizenship and that idea of voluntary citizenship really fascinated me um the idea that you know and hive is a strange name for it but

It's almost like a more complex and a more sophisticated, in my biased opinion, version of grouping people by values and by... by inclination the way that say like the harry potter sorting hat and sorting you know the harry potter houses would do and so you have these different hives and there are seven existing hives

at this point in history where her story begins and there's for example the the mitsubishi hive which is a quite a like a corporate corporatist commercial commercial hive there's the masonic empire which is a throwback to people who want to live in autocracy and have an emperor and draws a lot from roman history and there's the humanists which apparently is like a combination of an Olympic hive, an athletic hive, and a pop culture hive that forms, you know, a humanist hive that leads to...

that valorizes individual human achievement. And so this idea that... One of the things that I found interesting about it is how... It didn't inherently rely on existing forms of political organization for it. to kind of map a plausible future society. And it really felt like it gave me so many new ideas to think about. I mean, she draws a lot on her history as a historian, as a writer, and in a way that the prose style is sort of written as if it were an 18th century.

You know, it has like a lot of 18th century philosophy, enlightenment philosophy built into the story. And yeah, it's not a perfect... you know, future representation of a global system, but it's by far the most far ranging one that I've encountered from the 20th or the 21st century. And I encourage people to give it a shot if they're interested in that.

style of kind of sociologically oriented science sci-fi i also really liked uh the terra ignata series a lot and um especially i enjoyed the way that she extrapolates beyond just the like she has the really neat idea and then she extrapolates it both into the positive and the negative where we have the society that's built on not being geographically locked but

She also goes on to imagine what does a war look like when there's no borders, you know, when it's literally neighbor versus neighbor, but not with an easily identifying marker. I will say that I haven't finished the series yet, so my comments are just based on the first two books. But I'm sure that it remains just as interesting when you get to that part.

I'm looking forward to your comments when you do, because I really liked the series better as a whole than I liked the smaller parts of it. It's interesting you were saying it's written by a historian, because as you were talking about it...

I just had vibes from, you know, everything I learned about the French Revolution, that mentality that they wanted their message and what they were doing to be universal, not just for France, it was for all of humanity. And this... concept which is very 18th century that if you find those core values it could apply to anyone is not often seen in literature after that time period but it's interesting to see it make a comeback into science fiction

so that people can learn about it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I will admit that my personal worldview, I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that we can move past.

groundedness in locality and local community, but it was fascinating as a thought experiment. Yeah. All right, I'm up. So I really doubt anybody else has this on their list. The broad category, definitely, because it's the idea of time travelers meeting other versions of themselves. And that's been, you know, think like the diner scene from Looper, right? Where you have two people from, or one person from different parts of their lives having a conversation.

Specifically, what I'm talking about here is what's called The Convention, which is in a book called Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Farrell. But I'm going to try and tread somewhat lightly on spoilers. There's one major thing that's on the inside flap, so you'll know it before you read the book, probably. But if you like a twisty time travel tale, The Man in the Empty Suit is...

right up your alley. So it's essentially a birthday party for all versions of this time traveler. They meet every year at this one place in space and time. So he's there with younger and older versions of himself. There are strict convention rules. I'll mention a couple of them before I finish here, just to kind of avoid messing anything up.

They have rules. But the main character is 39 years old. And the inciting incident for the book is that at the convention, his 40-year-old self is murdered. And so it becomes kind of a, how could this happen? because there are older versions of himself still at the party as well. And so it's not like a hard science fiction thing where it's really going to break down exactly how that works with the timeline.

But it makes an interesting thing to think about, about what would you say to yourself, right? And of course, that's why you have to have the rules. I love the idea of all versions of the character showing up at this abandoned hotel in New York in the late 21st century. The rules, like there's a mysterious rule, it says, stay below the third floor.

Why? I don't know. And then there's more obvious ones like, try not to ruin the fun for the youngsters. And another one, gambling makes no sense in the past tense. I'll keep it brief. I do think it's, you know, it wasn't. an incredible book or anything, but I really enjoyed it. And especially just that part of it, because it was an interesting spin on the time travelers meeting themselves and what happens in that case.

Okay, we're back up to the top. I think this will probably be the last full pick that everybody gets. So if you need to prioritize stuff, pick your next favorite one. And then I think we'll wrap it up. Okay. Dan, yeah. All right. I'm going to go with an old standby, and that is psychic powers. That's the general. I'll bring it into a more specific, but...

It's something that we don't see in science fiction as much now as we used to. I think there was a stretch early on in sci-fi when it was a really popular idea. I think John W. Campbell was a big proponent of it, and then we also had L. Ron Hubbard with his Dianetics and all that. For a while, it was considered part of science, but it's...

since very much fallen out of favor scientifically and seems to have fallen out of science fiction somewhat. But we still have a lot of classic examples. Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is a... great one. And then you also have, of course, Dune and Star Wars. I'm going to go with a TV example so that you're not hanging your own self out to dry with all TV examples.

I'm going with a TV example that maybe is less common among American sci-fi fans, and that's from Mobile Suit Gundam, the anime series, which has new types, which are a kind of... psychic empath that in in the fiction it's theorized to result as a an evolution from living in space so people who are primed with this mutation when exposed to life in space develop this kind of psychic empathy with each other and there's the hope it's presented as a possible way to avoid war um and

The Gundam mythos is very much built around a... It's kind of military sci-fi, but regretful military sci-fi. It's not exactly anti-war, but it's very much leaning that direction. And with Mobile Suit Gundam, the new types are initially seen as a way to maybe move past it. Like, this is a generation we need to protect so that we can move past this. But of course, the bad actors will instead try to abuse it.

And as this timeline moves forward, there are greater dangers and greater weapons that are exploiting new types rather than allowing them to thrive. And it's... Sometimes overly pessimistic, but I really like that optimism that's baked into it as well. That idea that we're capable of moving forward and overcoming this species-wide shortcoming.

But we really need to protect that part of ourselves in order to get there. It's interesting that you picked that more contemporary example. The one that comes to mind for me, also TV, is the Wachowski series Sense8. which was a mid-2010s, very humanitarian look at psychic connection and psychic empathy, specifically on empathy, which is very different from that classical.

psychic powers um trope that was popular with the the campbellates that you mentioned and because they were focused on it really as a way of being super supermen and and stronger than others and Even when there was empathy in their methodology, oftentimes it was used to sniff out the weaknesses of others rather than... Psychic powers as an invasion. Yes. As an invasion of... mental autonomy or boundaries. All right. Emmanuel, your final pick. Yeah, so I think I'm going to go with...

A concept that I find fascinating but can actually break your brain is time deletion. It creates moral asymmetry. And the example I have is the... forever war, Joe Haldeman. And basically, realistic warfare causes soldiers to age slower than civilians because they are sent away on those ships. And because of... when they come back, maybe they've aged 10 years, but people that did not travel at the speed of light, well, they died, basically, by the time they come back.

He uses, I find in that novel, Haldeman, there's actually some, there's romance in it, but used in a clever way. He uses time deletion to explore the ethical imbalance of... relationships and because as I said soldiers they return to find lovers either aged or dead and the one partner sacrifices time the other one cannot and the that

creation that love between people becomes an artifact of violence and physics and the uh because of that and with my overarching theme of the other watching the other the returning soldier

becomes that other because he is perfectly changed and is alienated from his own species. And this book is written as a Vietnam War allegory, the returning soldiers being spat at by the... the the u.s civilians when they came back and that trauma is not just you know psychological it's temporal it's social it's real and um it's um you know the In that novel, the alien factor, the alien element, is not the enemy. It's that future that you no longer belong to. And it does ask a lot of questions.

I mean, I love the concept of time deletion and I find it a shame that it's not used properly in a lot of books. And I find that Joe Haldeman... does a great job in that one to explore how it would affect us as a society, but it narrows it down to interpersonal relationships to make it more, I would say, palatable, because otherwise, you know, it just gets on such a grand scale that's hard to follow.

And I just find the concept absolutely fascinating. Just like you said with the zone of doubts, you know, those concepts are bigger than anything we actually experience in our daily lives. And I find them very interesting as thought exercises to see how we could react ourselves in such a situation and how...

It would affect our own vision of ourselves and of others, which, as I said to me, is the strength of science fiction, because it forces you to put yourself into somebody else's shoes in a totally alien situation. To give an example from cinema, look at the movie Contact, where they actually talk about that, that she could go in that shape, Charlie Foster, the character.

and travel for four years but when she comes back everybody would have it 50 years because of time deviation and it's something that you have to grasp within you know, she has to accept it. And she does. It's not what happens in the movie, but that she accepts that this could happen. And I just find the whole idea truly fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. No, and that's a big, broad topic. And I,

I love that you picked a very specific aspect of it from the Forever War. You sniped one of mine with that. But I had a different example, which is Kimbo Young's. novel at I'm Waiting for You. It's part of her collection, I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, which is phenomenal. If we're talking translated sci-fi, which is a... Something that I'm very interested in. But yeah, it's like this concept of using when long distance space travel becomes a thing, there's a service that offers.

time dilation as a way of being able to um to not lose the connection with somebody that you're close to in your life and so it follows it's like an epistolary novelette where a series of journals from this person who's trying to um who's who's waiting for their fiance to get back from a trip and can and things go wrong getting back from the trip and so they continue to

skip time through time dilation to the point where they actually surpass the length of their society. You know, their society crumbles before. It's quite a melancholic story. It's beautiful. And actually... Denis Villeneuve reportedly signed on to direct an adaptation of the story, so that would be very cool if it happens. That sounds like the kind of story that's right up my alley.

I recommend checking it out. It's beautiful. Yeah, it sounds great. All right, we're down to me, my final pick. I think I'm going to go with one that I can't talk about for very long just because it's one of those ones, I think, Kaylin, when you mentioned... start of your list is like things where a concept has just stuck in your brain like a splinter and this one especially and i don't even know what uh how to broadly define it um and it's the the concept of breach

from The City and the City, the China Mieville one. Oh! Just like the whole idea of unseeing and unhearing and stuff where anyone who hasn't read the novel, it's not going to spoil it because... You have to lock your brain into it in order to understand what's going on. But that there are these two cities that are side by side in space and even overlap in places.

But people from one side don't see the people from the other, and they're not allowed to. They're not permitted to see or hear or acknowledge that the other side is there. Unless the border is actually crossed, I believe. I can't remember. And there's a police force called Breach that enforces this. And it's an idea that I really enjoyed the book, mostly because that concept...

was so big and so, so out there. And so I don't even know what else I can say about it, but it's, it's amazing concept. It's one that I considered for this as well, actually. And for me, I think one of the things I find most fascinating about it is that our narrator character, he does see the other side of it, but he convinces himself that he doesn't. And there's kind of this baked in fear that...

If you see them, if you acknowledge you see them, they're going to come get you. And so the more you see, the more you need to pretend you don't see. And it's kind of a mental prison that they've locked themselves in that is more effective than... actual enforcement well and i think you know that kind of concept has real world analogs in

divided political sides, right? Where you can't acknowledge that the other side made a point. If you acknowledge that they made that point, well, that's a rock out of your wall, right? Absolutely, yeah. Well, also just the way that self-censorship can be a form of... self-preservation in an authoritarian society and that concept of unseeing of something that is physically there as an allegory for unseeing.

the truth in a society that tells you that the truth is dangerous. Also, for a movie recommendation in that segment, it's not science fiction, but it's part of the same themes. is the movie uh the life of others the german movie on life uh in eastern germany east germany because that's exactly how they lived they knew they were watched all the time so they took it for granted and they would

either censure themselves or not see what was in front of them because they expect the Stasi, the state police, to basically always be spying on them. And so they have to change their behavior because of that. And that movie... shows you that in an amazing way. It's a remarkable movie. And so, you know, science fiction has ramifications everywhere. Okay.

I do want to do just a really, really brief kind of bring out your data here, but I want us to make sure not to hit anything too hard just because I might want to do another one of these and I don't want to steal from future panels. So if you have a couple things where you're like, you know,

If you want to talk about things that kind of fit the theme but not go too much into it, that's fine. I might mention a couple of things as well, but we'll start with Dan. Well, I mentioned a couple of mine that got...

They were low on my list, but they got sniped from the bottom of my list. So I won't even call them really being sniped, but I'm glad somebody picked them up because I probably wouldn't have gotten to them. There's one that was sort of similar. Kaylin mentioned the... the quantum magician which i haven't read but there's a book with a similar title called the quantum thief that i was going to use as a second example in my um my merged consciousness um concept

And in The Quantum Thief, it is also a... You took the description almost specifically as it's a far future kind of heist story. But in that one, there are these... giant computational megastructures that have kind of consumed multiple multiple millions of consciousnesses to become their traveling societies that was

That was the big one that I didn't get to. Okay. All right. Emmanuel? Yeah, I have two. One that I already talked a bit about is the Culture Series by INM Banks, always with my theme of exploring the other. In that post-scarcity utopia, the culture sees itself as a civilized and benevolent society. Yet its intentions, especially in the...

The early books, like Use of Weapons or Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games, they exposed the arrogance of assuming moral superiority. And banks... challenges our perception of what it means to be human when AI minds are often more compassionate, rational, and ethical than we are. It reframes, if you want, the us and the them. Because sometimes the culture is the colonizer, sometimes the savior. And it reveals that the perception of the other often masks...

self-interest and moral blind spot. So I find that this whole series is great at exploring the ultimate test of what an enlightened society could be.

title i want i'd like to talk briefly is uh planet of the apes uh pierre bull it's um it's the ultimate reversal uh as a revelation you know humanity as a whole becomes the other uh you you talked about it before too dan um and uh in that In the famous version, the apes study our intelligence and they study those primitive humans, which is the opposite of what we do.

the reader, they have to confront their own assumptions about intelligence, civilization, and superiority. And Bull uses that satire to expose our fragile pride. and how easily cruelty and prejudice can be justified when we believe that the other is lesser. the ending, whatever it's on. The movie in the book is quite different when it comes to the ending, but they have the same theme, is that dehumanizing is self-destructive.

no matter how you put it. And it's also a parable about recognition and denial. And I just found those concepts in that book. Very, very fascinating. More in the book I find in the movie. Even though the movie is real. And for more on that, Emmanuel and I did an entire episode on that book in my podcast. And that was fantastic. All right, Caitlin, quick hit.

Yeah. So the one that I didn't get to that I thought I might was the, you know, like there's a big picture theme that runs through a lot of science fiction, which is first contact. underneath that the thing that interests me a lot are attempts at communication and everybody at this point everybody knows about arrival so i'm not going to talk about it but the The book that I've read with the most fascinating xenolinguistics, as somebody who is a linguist, was Charnabeeville's Embassy Town.

And I'm somebody who, and I think this goes for people who are in the hard sciences, which I am not. You know, the story is like anybody who's a scientist reads science fiction, and if it focuses on their field, they always gnash their teeth and complain about how unrealistic it is. And I'm sort of like that with language in sci-fi. Embassy Town was just so fantastic in its depth of cultural inability to, or even just biological inability to.

cross-link because of the way that the human language and the way that alien language worked in that. And the devastating consequences of actually ending up being able to cross that barrier.

in a way that did not align with the best interests of the alien party. Yeah, but I won't go into it anymore because this is the click shot. I'll be really brief on mine, just because I... need to wrap up um so yeah the the a couple really really quick ones for me the there's a house in in hyperion in one of the the tales in Hyperion, the Farcaster, the whole idea of the Farcaster house, where each doorway leads to a room on a different world. And just the idea that you could have one dwelling.

with rooms on multiple worlds is just fascinating to me. I don't know how doorbells work in that concept, but neither here nor there. The battle room from Ender's game, just, you know, zero G laser tag is such a cool idea. And then the net. from the Oxford time travel series and the concept of slippage in particular, I think is really fantastic just because the idea is like, if you can't get, and I'm,

I know that it can be frustrating for people who like a more hard science fiction thing. But the concept is like, if you were, you're trying to travel using the net. and you're going to be too close to something important, it just slips you in time or space. And that might end up putting you in the Black Death, or it might end up putting you in a field of marrows when you want to be getting near a cathedral. And I think that's really interesting.

What was the laugh, Caitlin? Sorry, it's just I am one of those people who just cannot handle the way that Connie Rillis writes her books. And the concept of slippage is cool. The fact that it's repeated like 70,000 times in Doomsday Book just drove me bananas. I do understand. Yeah. I get that one.

Okay. Well, you guys, I think this turned out really, really good. And I think it's going to give some people some stuff to read. Maybe I'll come back and circle back with another group and do another one of these down the line.

So before we actually sign off, if you have anything you want to plug, go for it. So let's start with you, Dan. No, I'm just here for the fun of it. Excellent. Perfect. And thanks for joining. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Emmanuel, I think I know what you want to plug.

well I'm a repeated guest on your show and I truly appreciate that it's a lot of fun every time Seth so as your listeners know by now i'm the host of lafayette we are here a french history podcast you can find it on lafayettepodcast.com or if you're interested more and more into my reading and movie viewing, you can head to manufoto.com. So M-A-N-U-P-H-O-T-O.com. And you have all the links to my podcast, but also to my story graph in my letterbox. Oh, cool. All right.

All right, Kalen, I know you've got something. Yeah, well, so I am a board member with the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, and we are just about to launch our... Aurora Awards, which is like the Canadian version of the Hugos, kind of fan-based community voted awards for sci-fi. A retrospective book club.

And we're launching in January to celebrate a couple of years down the road our 50th anniversary. So we're going to be reading a novel a month. And I'd just like to extend an invitation to anybody to join that. You don't have to be Canadian, but we will be reading Canadian works. um canadian winners and that'll be kind of happening through discord but you can find other or more info at our website kisfa.ca that's c-s-f-f-a.ca

And I also think that we should just plug the Nebula Lugo Discord because that's where we all met each other. Absolutely. You know, if folks are interested in having the conversation... Like we're having over text. We are always talking. It's a very, very active Discord. It's lovely for that. And it is one of the friendliest places on the internet. Oh, yes.

Yeah, and people are focused on reading some Hugo and Nebula books, but talking about all different sorts of sci-fi, talking about movies that are coming out. And yeah, it is very friendly and very lovely to... kind of explore different books in that community space yeah i find people there not only they have the good hindsight but they never judge anything you could love a book and i could hate it and we just talk about it and there is never ever a bad world

Never seen something like that, especially on the internet. I mean, of all places, that's where people, you know, behind the safety of the keyboard, they just yell at each other. Nobody does that on that Discord, and I find it really refreshing. Yeah. I agree. Absolutely. All right, guys. Well, this was really a lot of fun and I'm definitely going to look into doing this again. So if you're out there and you're somebody who thinks, hey, I'd like to do something like that.

reach out to me. If you're on the discord, just send me a direct message, but you can always email me feedback at hugospodcast.com. And yeah, we'll set something up. So, all right. Thanks guys. It's a great way to finish out the year. So I appreciate it. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Merci, Seth. Bye, y'all. Hey there, everybody. Starting strong. I was looking at the word everyone, and I said everybody, and it threw me off. Even when I have it written down, it still can go off the rails.