[Francesca] John Feffer, welcome to Writer's Voice. [John Feffer] Thanks for having me on the show. [Francesca] Songlands brings the Splinterlands trilogy to a close. The other two previous novels are Splinterlands, Frostlands, and now Songlands. Give us a brief overview of this trilogy. [John Feffer] So overall the series is about the fragmenting, the the splitting up of the world, of large entities like the European Union, the United States, Russia, and it parallels the splintering of a family, the Wests. And it's helmed by Julian West, a geopaleontologist, someone who is tasked with studying the fragmenting of large entities in the geopolitical space, much as a paleontologist looks back into history to try to understand the disappearance of dinosaurs. Julian West is interested in understanding how the dinosaurs of the past, namely the United States, Russia, and so forth, managed to go extinct. As he is doing so, he is experiencing a fragmenting of his own, his family falls apart, his wife divorces him, his children become estranged from him. That's the thrust of the first novel, Splinterlands. The second novel is narrated by his wife, who is living on a kind of a commune in northern Vermont, in a country that basically no longer exists. And she too is trying to understand from her own perspective, she's a climate scientist, where things went wrong in terms of humanity's attempt to avoid the climate apocalypse. And then finally, the third volume Songlands is from the point of view of their daughter, who is a former Eurocrat or bureaucrat in in Europe, who harbors these delusions of grandeur as a poet, and who also is thrust into the unlikely spot of trying to save the world. That certainly was not her intention, but she's kind of a a North by Northwest figure, an innocent who is brought into global intrigues against her will and is forced to take on the helm of savior of one sort or another. So those are the three volumes, the the father, the mother and then the daughter [Francesca] These are short novels, and in some ways they're more like novellas, or maybe between a novella and a novel, they're really well written and totally engaging. And of course, the subject is one very near and dear to my heart, as my listeners know, and that is the climate catastrophe that is bearing down on us quite swiftly and has, of course, advanced quite a bit. My sense is that this takes place about 50 years in the future, roughly. So looking back across all three books, was there a question that you were trying to answer? [John Feffer] Well, I mean, the major answer, of course, is what went wrong? I mean, from the perspective of 2050, but then, you know, from our perspective, what is going wrong? And why are we not able to get a handle on these problems? I mean, in the past, it seems like human ingenuity was inspired to address the major problems that affected humanity. For instance, there were concerns in the 19th century, that we would not be able to grow enough food to feed the growing population on the planet. And certainly, we were able through various scientific advances, although some might argue they were not always advances, managed to grow enough food to increase the productivity of the food we were growing, as well as bring up more land into cultivation at the expense of often forests and marshlands and so forth. But we have failed to address this question of climate change. And although we do have a lot of scientists who are pouring their energies and resources into figuring out, for instance, geoengineering efforts to change the climate through scientific means, we haven't been able to kind of restrain our more base impulses, that is to eat a lot to consume a lot of energy to continue to grow our economies, which ultimately is the problem that we're facing is overconsumption and overuse of natural resources. So that was kind of the general topic I wanted to address. The geopolitical splintering, well, that was of interest to me, but I was more kind of intrigued by, especially the failure of our politicians to address this question in a meaningful way. I mean, we've obviously come up with voluntary efforts through the Paris Agreement to reduce carbon emissions, but those have largely been ignored. And as we see with our current administration in the United States, it's very possible to reverse a commitment to reduction of carbon and embrace once again fossil fuels in a kind of maniacal fashion. So that was the kind of key question I was interested in. [Francesca] And it surprises me in a way that you kind of make it more general. We overconsume. We have made this choice. And yet in your books, in the Splinterlands trilogy, there is a clear corporate actor, in this case, the CRISPR Corporation, which is trying its own solution to climate change. But what it posits is a world that more and more people are becoming more and more aware of, and that is a world that is run by oligarchs, and in particular, run by petro-oligarchs. So I wonder, before we go more into the meat of these books, how do you tease out this we versus those actors who, you know, what do they say? It's just 70 companies that are responsible for most of our climate changing emissions. [John Feffer] Yes. I mean, I agree that, you know, for the most part, the over-reliance on fossil fuels and so forth is driven by corporate interests and has been driven by corporate interests for a long time. But when I say we, I guess what I mean here is we of the Global North. And when I say Global North, of course, that's both a territorial designation, but it also refers to those pockets of wealth in the Global South. And we in the Global North are responsible for the lion's share of carbon emissions. We are responsible for overconsumption in terms of, you know, the sheer number of calories we consume per person at the expense of, often, folks in the Global South. So addressing climate change really will require some notion of justice. In other words, it's not a question of all the people on the planet having to tighten their belts, but really the wealthier folks and, well, the corporations that often reflect their interests, they're the folks who are really going to have to tighten their belts, but not tighten their belts in an individual sense. I mean, because the solution to climate change is not a decision simply to, I don't know, reduce the amount of red meat we eat every week. It really will require systemic change. And so I don't want to put the onus on any given individual. Now, when we turn to novels, we're talking about individuals. I mean, novels are the great, you know, bourgeois invention. I don't focus on corporations, you know, or collectivities for the most part. And so what I wanted to do was, you know, create individuals that, you know, are real, as real as possible, in a fictional way, but who represent different aspects and different choices that are made by people these days in addressing larger questions. [Francesca] So the world of Songlands, as we've said, is devastated by climate change. And there's a turning point that is looming. I just thought briefly, we should touch on the feedback loop that some of the characters are desperately trying to stop. And I guess I want to ask you with that, do you think that there's any possibility that we could in fact stop the complete disappearance of the ice? [John Feffer] So yes, so the feedback loop is this ice albedo effect. And in other words, ice reflects back sunlight and therefore, you know, serves as a way of cooling the planet. But if you if the ice melts, then the sunlight is not reflected back and is instead absorbed into the water and raises the temperature of the water. It's not the only, obviously, it's not the only problem related to climate change. Obviously, we have methane release, we have lots of other dangerous trends. But I wanted to focus on the ice albedo effect, because it was something that could serve as a research topic for our wife in the second volume. And she succeeds in figuring out a way to reverse the ice albedo effect. And, you know, strictly speaking, this is geoengineering. This is not a natural process by which we, for instance, reduce our carbon emissions and the planet then responds in an effective way to achieve greater homeostasis. No, it's an intervention, a human intervention. And this becomes kind of the question in the third volume in Songlands, do we have a right as humans to intervene? And is there a possibility that if we intervene, we'll make things worse? And we have plenty of examples of that in the fictional world. You know, if I remember correctly, one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels includes Ice Nine as a geoengineering feat gone wrong. And we have that great Snowpiercer, the movie of the train going around an ice-locked planet, because again, a geoengineering feat went wrong. So that becomes a question in the third volume. But by that point, and I'm extrapolating, of course, in 2050, there might not be a choice. You know, in other words, our efforts at more human approaches or more planet-friendly approaches to addressing climate change might be exhausted. We might have passed the point of no return in that sense. And I think a lot of people are expecting that we, even if we are able to restrain our carbon emissions, we will experience overshoot. In other words, we'll go beyond the 1.5 and probably the 2% Celsius increase, and then have to dial it back from there. So this is my extrapolation from 2050 going backward, and Aurora leading a movement to fulfill the mission that her mother has set up, and in collaboration with a sentient robot, which is something else I wanted to introduce, because I imagine that we would have by 2050, achieved some measure of sentience with our artificial intelligence. [Francesca] Yeah, that's a fascinating part that I want to get to soon. But before doing that, and I am talking with John Feffer about his trilogy, the Splinterlands trilogy, and focusing on the last of that trilogy, Songlands. The earlier ones are Splinterlands and Frostlands. Let's talk a little bit about CRISPR-Inc. CRISPR, of course, being the gene editing technology that we already have. CRISPR has now become basically the dominant corporation in the world. And it has a kind of approach to sustainability that is quite the opposite from the commune in Vermont. I wonder if you could draw that contrast. And what are you getting at here? The two different versions. One is the version of the, you know, very much our tech overlords who think that they're somehow going to save themselves, and thereby save the planet, but nobody else, and the other that is looking to save everybody. [John Feffer] So CRISPR, as you point out, is a gene editing technique, and it has proven to be very effective in addressing diseases that previously had been resistant to other efforts. But obviously, you know, CRISPR is a kind of a god technology. I mean, to be able to go into the actual DNA to go into the recipe of life itself and alter it is, well, can provide the people in charge of that technology with extraordinary power. And as we know, one of the great fascinations of the Silicon Valley titans, the billionaires, and now, unfortunately, trillionaires, is to live forever, you know, and many of them are embarked on this extraordinary effort to extend their lifespan, and possibly, in conjunction with digital technology, transfer their brains into some digital form so that they can live forever. So I find this, or I found this when I was writing the books, to be a really disturbing phenomenon, that the richest were spending a lot of their money to preserve their own lifespans, not necessarily increasing the lifespans of average people, because they thought they were worth it, you know, that their lives were more important than the lives of other people. So I imagine that, you know, that CRISPR might do something similar, this CRISPR corporation, that it would figure out the secret of immortality. But the secret of immortality, if given to everybody, well, given the constraints of the planet, would doom the planet. If we all lived forever, and we were all eating everything and consuming everything forever, and continuing to have children, etc, that would be game over. So from CRISPR's point of view, all of the things that were contributing to population decline were all to the better. And in fact, if climate change was reducing the population of arid places, all to the better, because it would leave more of the planet to those who were immortal, essentially. So that's on the one side. And then on the other side, of course, are those movements in the year 2050, that are still attempting to preserve life for as many people as humanly possible or planetarily possible. And that requires addressing climate change, it requires addressing pandemics, and all the other scourges that have gone out of control by 2050, and are claiming large segments of the population. So these are kind of the two, what turn out to be the two, the protagonist and the antagonist, if you will, of the final volume. And, you know, there's no answer by the end. It's still a kind of a question mark. But this is the Manichean struggle, if you will, that occupies the novel. [Francesca] Yeah, and what is, I mean, I think it's actually quite true to form. I think they are fully aware that they're destroying the planet, and they think that somehow they're going to survive, whether it's on Earth or someplace else. And I think what's so strange about their particular kind of psychopathy is that they don't seem to understand that you cannot destroy 99% of humanity without also destroying 99% of the environment, which will also make the planet uninhabitable for the 1%. [John Feffer] Yes, exactly. I mean, I'm reminded of what Margaret Thatcher said, that she didn't believe that there was any such thing as society, that there were only individuals. And that's essentially the philosophy of these titans of industry. They don't believe in society. They don't believe that anything collective, which frankly, has been the source of their income, because if there hadn't been a society within which they could build their enterprises, they would not be titans of industry. But nevertheless, they only believe in individuals and great individuals. You know, it's interesting, there was a great article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker about Elon Musk's grandfather, who is kind of a fascist from Canada, who had relocated or relocated to South Africa, because he found the eugenics policies there congenial to his own. And that many of the prevailing ideologies of the grandfather had been transmitted one way or the other to the grandson, Elon Musk himself, such that Elon Musk basically believes in this uber mensch approach of which he is one, and that he alone and those of his ilk are the ones responsible for repopulating the planet with similarly intelligent people. But anything that smacks of society, and that would include, say, a government that was providing goods and services to the population, has to be reduced to something small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist once said about liberalism and government more generally. And so, this focus on individuals and individual success is, as you say, it is enormously corrosive in terms of our ability as a society, as a group of societies, to address something in a systemic fashion, because, you know, it relies on the great individual to come up with solutions, and the great individual, generally speaking, does not do so. [Francesca] So, let's go on now to this creature or person that CRISPR has created. This is the first actual, this is the first AI robot that has consciousness, that you posit. Your character, Karen, she's conscious. She doesn't even know at first that she's an AI, a robot. And unlike most human fear fantasies about AIs, she is not driven by domination. In fact, she suggests that humans project their own fears onto artificial intelligence. You're really going against the standard AI apocalypse narrative. So, what is your sense of what she is saying and what you are thinking that's behind this? [John Feffer] Well, there's a saying in Silicon Valley, or perhaps beyond Silicon Valley, garbage in, garbage out. In other words, the computer programs you make are entirely reflective of the care and intelligence that you put into it. If you put into it a desire, whether it's explicit or implicit, to kill all of humanity, well, then that's going to be what comes out. And, you know, I do think while we look around at the world today, and there's plenty of horrific things to talk about, there's lots of things we can doom scroll about. And so, one could imagine that our AIs would reflect that, that we would have an AI as horrifically focused on world domination as Elon Musk, for instance. I mean, it's certainly, if he were to create the AI, it would probably look a lot like him. But there are, of course, other options. If we put into our AI the love and care and nurturing that we presumably put into our children, there's a good possibility that we will have sensible and responsible AI creations. There's no guarantee. I mean, obviously, you do that for a child and he could still turn out to be a psychopath. But there's a higher probability, especially since AI, they don't have genes, per se, and any kind of genetic inheritance that they're dealing with. So, I wanted to imagine that an AI could, in fact, operate according to a different blueprint. And also that the AI would be flawed, because there's no reason to believe that an AI would be perfect. Since we're not perfect, and it's hard to imagine we've ever created anything that's been perfect. So, why should the AIs that we create be perfect? So, our Karen is, yes, flawed. She hits herself in the head when she can't figure something out. She's just, she makes mistakes. But ultimately, first of all, she's been, like all other AIs that have been created through to 2050 or so, she has been imbued with the directive to do no harm. So, that's baseline. But on top of that, she is essentially imprinted upon the people that she wakes up to, just like a little chick is imprinted on whatever it lays its eyes on, first of all. And she lays her eyes on Rachel and the community in northern Vermont. And she reflects it in some important ways, such that she feels protective of it. And she identifies the organization that created her, CRISPR, as evil. And she has made her choice. She has decided that she will defend this community in Vermont against the predations of this distant corporation. And I'd like to believe that an AI that is imbued with the directive to do no harm, and who thereafter discovers that love is an important kind of operating system, if you will, to define one's relations with the world, will make moral choices like that. So, I wanted to spin that out. Look, there's enough apocalypse in these three volumes. I figured, why do I have to have AI apocalypse? To add to that, let's have a countervailing trend here. [Francesca] And I love that idea of love as an operating system, because I think that's very much at the heart of what drives certainly the third in the trilogy, Songlands, forward. Because the family comes together, and it does come together out of love. And Karen, the AI, is a key component of enjoining that family in some way. And I want to talk a little bit, John Feffer, about the title of Songlands that points to the power of poetry. How does poetry, rather than technology or politics alone, become one of the engines of change in this world? [John Feffer] So, I was struck when I visited a museum in Paris, it was a museum on Islamic art and history. There was a description of these gatherings that used to take place around the Saudi, what is now Saudi Arabia. But this was, you know, many, many years before even the rise of Muhammad and Islam, that these Bedouin tribes, mostly, would come together, along with seafaring nations, for these poetry festivals. And this was this extraordinary opportunity for cultures to meet one another, to celebrate the occasion, to exchange goods and services. And I thought, what an interesting substitute for war, because they could come together and kill each other. Certainly, that is more, it seems, what happens in human history. But no, poetry served as a kind of a mediating influence among all of these groups. So, I thought, hmm, this could be an interesting opportunity to place against the fragmenting forces that have created the splinter lands of the 21st century, a unifying force. And unifying, not from a single point of view, like a dictator saying, you all have to come together, but rather, a very diverse, multicultural commitment to narratives, to culture, to celebration. So, I decided that Aurora, our daughter and the narrator of the third volume, would be a poet, that through poetry, she would try and bring people together. And that the poems themselves would reflect a number of the great poems in history. And so, we have selections from seven or so of those poems that include, for instance, Conference of the Birds, which is this great poem that represented Sufi philosophy. It's a grand narrative of birds going out on a search for the one great bird to lead them all. And that, if anything, that becomes kind of the backbone of the novel, this search, this great search for unity, for truth, and through poetry and through common struggle. And, you know, she's an academic, so, you know, she's teaching a course, and the course itself becomes this method of transmitting these ideas, but also of bringing people together in struggle. And in that, I was inspired by the famous Flying Universities of Poland. The Flying Universities were initially from the 19th century. Madame Curie participated in them, and they were an effort by Poles to organize against – Poland was divided by three empires at the time – but to organize against the Russians, the Germans, the Austro-Hungarians. But later, under Solidarity in the 1980s, 1970s, and 1980s, the opposition in Poland sponsored these Flying Universities. And they're called Flying because they went from apartment to apartment, because they couldn't be in one place, or they would have alerted the authorities to their presence. So, they travel from place to place, but they transmitted information about Polish history, Polish struggle, Polish politics, and they effectively trained a new generation of opposition people who then were successful in transforming Poland from 1989 on. So, I was inspired by that as well. And so, that's what Aurora is doing with her poetry seminar, channeling all the energy and strength of these historic poems, but also kind of providing a framework for a new opposition to come to the foreground. [Francesca] Aurora says, "We must believe in this impossible thing, breathe life into lyrics and teach them to sing." What is the impossible thing you most hope that readers will believe in after finishing The Songlands? [John Feffer] Well, you know, it is a call to action and a call to action in the face of what seems to be impossible odds. And God knows that's the theme of so many novels, great novels going back through history. And most novels, of course, end with a degree of ambivalence, because for the most part, only bad novels end with a call to action. You know, you think of Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done, which was a terrible novel, but of course, inspired Lenin and others to become revolutionaries. But it was a terrible novel. And so I didn't want to write a terrible novel. I wanted a novel that was complex and full of ambiguity and ambivalence. But nevertheless, for people to take all of that complexity and say, well, the struggle today to work together on projects to combat seemingly impossible challenges like climate change, to write poetry in the face of all of the naysayers who say that it makes no sense to write poetry or novels today. You know, we're in an emergency. Would you write a poem in the middle of an earthquake? Of course not. It's a terrifying event. And yet, coming out of this third volume, I would hope people would say, yes, we actually do have to write poetry during an earthquake. We do have to come together as a group of people, even as the technocrats and the tech titans tell us we don't exist as collective groups. We have to challenge those received notions and struggle, continue to struggle in the most imaginative and creative ways possible. [Francesca] That's a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much, John Pfeffer, for talking with us about your Splinterlands trilogy and especially focusing on the last of the trilogy, Songlands. I love them all. They're really fun to read and very, very thought-provoking. Thank you so much. [John Feffer] Thank you so much for your questions, which were wonderful, and this opportunity to talk about this trilogy. [Francesca Rheannon] Portia Elan, welcome to Writer's Voice. [Portia Elan] It is wonderful to be here. [Francesca Rheannon ] This is a novel that spans about 600 years, beginning in 1985, with a young woman named Bex learning how to code. Tell us a little bit about her. [Portia Elan] So Bex is 19, and she is angry in the ways that many 19-year-olds can be angry, in that she's trying to figure out where she fits in the world, and she keeps coming up sort of against things that don't feel like they fit. And she has been, at the point when the book starts, she's been coding kind of on her own with her uncle's supervision and guidance for four years, and she's now in university. And I think the 80s were a really interesting time for coding and computers, in that there was a lot of creativity and a lot more, I think, diversity in terms of what languages people were using, what was possible. Kind of a scrappy beginning. And so that is what Bex is entering into. [Francesca Rheannon ] She's also carrying a profound grief because her beloved uncle has died, and he's died of AIDS. She herself is queer. And I think this is part of what I see as a theme in the book, because she is matched in many ways by a character at the end of the timeline in 2585, who is a woman named Yeshiko. Tell us about Yeshiko and also how she also feels estranged. She's trying to find her place in the world, and her place is really one boat that she is the captain of. [Portia Elan] So Yeshiko is the captain of a sailboat. And captain makes it sound quite formal. She only has one crew member. So it is a kind of a small existence or a small circle of trust. And the world that she lives in in this 26th century, we don't actually see a lot of the institutional world, but the part of the world that Yeshiko lives in, she is a smuggler, a drug runner, a scavenger, basically doing whatever she can to survive and to maintain her independence. That is key to her, is that she can maintain this boat, Babylon, so that she can feel in control of her life. And I like that you are able to see those echoes. Yeshiko is probably in her late 40s or early 50s. I wanted to explore, okay, what would happen if someone who felt as estranged and alone as Bex in their teenage years didn't find family? What happens if they didn't find their community? Who do they become then later in life? And that was a lot of what I was exploring with Yeshiko when I first imagined her. [Francesca Rheannon ] And back now to Bex, this game, Homebound, is something that she creates after her uncle dies. He has left her an unfinished game, and she finishes it in her grief. It becomes an act of creation rather than a ritual of mourning, which I think it kind of begins as, an act of creation that leads to healing. What interested you about the relationship between grief and creativity and healing? [Portia Elan] Oh, I don't want to say that grief is a lesson or we need to look for the good part of grief. I don't want to say that. But I do think when we are able to take grief and sorrow, love that no longer has a place to go, and instead of making that smaller, if we can then weave it into the fabric of our lives through making, making video games, making quilts, making gardens, there are lots of ways to make with grief. It is not just the grief, then, or the sadness of the grief. We are then taking that love we would have given to that person and growing it rather than shutting it away. [Francesca Rheannon ] I think there again, there is an echo between Becca and Yesico too, because she also is grieving. In some ways, she grieves her father, her dead father. But more than that, she's grieving her crew member, who is a kind of more of a father than her own father was to her. Tell us about Root and the role that he plays in the story. [Portia Elan] Root is her crew member. You find out quite early on that he joined the crew when her parents were still alive and when she was quite young. He has been a mentor, a teacher to her for basically the entirety of her life. When the book begins, we know quite early on that he is dying, that a medical intervention has begun to fail. Root, though, is not just a crew member. He has also been a collector of stories and sort of a keeper of Yesico's sense of identity and home. So as she faces the failure of his medical device, the possibility of life without him, she is having to reckon with sort of like, how do I rebuild my idea of home without this person? [Francesca Rheannon ] You know, one of the things, kind of the sidelines of the book that I really enjoyed were the technological imagination. And one of the cases of it are the nanites. Tell us what these nanites are. This is the medical intervention you just spoke of. They are really about connection. [Portia Elan] They are. And I had quite a bit of fun doing some reading about actual things that are happening in science and medicine that maybe are not yet ready to be sort of rolled out broadly, but that scientists are sort of poking at and being like, this is possible. And the nanites are one of them. The nanites are really, really, tiny robots. And in Root's case, they were intended to repair damage to his spinal column and instead have also then begun to connect him to Babylon, the boat they are on. And so the nanites, yes, they're sort of meant to do one thing, but then we end up finding connection in them in an unexpected way. [Francesca Rheannon ] So there is this really, I think, overarching theme of connection. And very much this plot is involved with the characters finding connection. I mean, not just a connection to the ship, but connections to each other, connections to found family, as opposed to the family you were born into. I wonder if you could talk about that. And also in the light of your own life, I mean, the character, Becca, is gay. And I know that you were the recipient of a Lambda Award. Is that correct for a story? I was a Lambda Fellow. You were a Lambda Fellow. Well, first of all, for those of our listeners who don't know what that is, tell us briefly what that is and how this book intersects with how you have negotiated finding your own home. [Portia Elan] Yeah. So Lambda is a really incredible organization that looks to support LGBTQ plus authors. And a few years ago now, I received a fellowship. So I got to go down to Southern California for, I think it was for a week and we did workshops and readings and just got to be in community with other queer writers. The ways that the book echoes my own experience of found family, I think I would say that I have for a good chunk of my life felt a kind of profound sense of separation from the world. And perhaps parts of that are rooted in being queer and growing up in the 90s with no queer adults in my life and no real media representation and a lot of language, unkind and disparaging language about what it meant to be queer. But I also think that it's kind of a human experience to feel a profound separation from the world that is not for everyone rooted in queerness or even in overt difference from the people around you. I think sometimes we just feel separate. And that was a large motivating factor for me writing the book is wanting to explore that separation. And in my own life, the times when I have felt most a part of something most when I belonged have often really been with chosen family. And that is, you know, people with whom I have done hard things, whether that's, you know, my friends from my self-defense classes, whether or not that's my friends who I became a teacher with, sort of the idea of going through hard things and being able to be vulnerable and caring with other people has done a lot to create a sense of family and belonging for me. [Francesca Rheannon ] One other overarching theme of this book is the role of stories. And of course, a game is the game in the book. Homebound is a story. It's a video game. And that's all tied up with a whole idea of choice. So make this connection between kind of the game in the book. Is the book a game itself? Because there are a lot of elements in which the reader is really trying to figure out what's really going on here. And then it all does come down, I think, very much to the choices that the characters make to find home and connection. [Portia Elan] Yeah. Something I really love about computer games is the sense that they are, particularly narrative games where there's a story being told, is that they are a conversation between the game designer and the player. And so the conversation is incomplete when the game is just sitting there static on the computer. It requires the participation of the player. And similarly, I really love a novel that asks me to do some work, that asks me to do a little bit of leaping and a little bit of trusting, and maybe doesn't spell out everything that is happening within the world of the characters. And so when I started writing Homebound, I knew I wanted to create one of those novels that asked the reader to be a participant. Not maybe to the extent of like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, but that there was work that the reader would have to do to hold connection, to hold meaning between the different characters and between the different timelines. [Francesca Rheannon ] Yeah, I love that. Let's also talk about the AI character Haya. A wonderful, wonderful character. Why were they created in the book, in the storyline of the book? Why was Haya created? [Portia Elan] Haya is an automaton, so like a human-shaped robot. And in the world of the book, Haya is part of a fleet of automatons who were initially created to deal with climate change damage to environments, to be able to go in and do sort of care for environments without human intervention. So to track flora and fauna and weather and make choices about how things could be adjusted or changed in order to support the health of the whole ecosystem. [Francesca Rheannon ] So care was the word I was looking for, because this is also a theme. You know, Haya is driven by caring, not just for the environment, but also for the siblings who were abandoned by their mother. There's Tov, which by the way means good in Hebrew, and Shula, who figure in the story, the story at the end of the timeline. And Haya raises questions that increasingly confront us in the real world. What makes a being conscious? What makes a life meaningful? So tell us about exploring those ideas within the context of the purpose that Haya is created for. [Portia Elan] Haya really came to me as this sort of folkloric voice. They speak in first-person plural, and it's maybe a little woo-sounding, but when I am writing and there is a voice, sometimes I have to sort of excavate to figure out what is the narrative context for this voice. And when I was thinking about Haya, I was thinking a lot about the idea of elders and caretakers, people who hold story. And at the same time, I was also thinking about outsiders, because Haya is kind of ultimately the most outsider of all the outsiders in the book. They are one of one. They are the only automaton who has gained consciousness. And I don't want to spoil it, but there is a narrative reason why they gain consciousness that has to do with care and story and how we treat one another. And so those were kind of the ideas that I was chewing on and working very much in the tradition of science fiction, using the way we treat AI or robots as a reflection of what that says about us as humans, how we treat the stranger, reflecting on our values and our ability to welcome and be curious rather than being afraid. [Francesca Rheannon ] Yeah, because so much of the narrative, I mean, the dominant narrative, not the narrative in your book, the dominant narrative about AI is centered around terror, the fear that they are going to kill us all. I mean, I was listening to YouTube the other day by somebody who used to work for OpenAI. And he said, he'd say within five years, the human race was going to be extinct because of the AI. The AI is, you know, going to take over. So this is a strikingly different narrative that the one sentient AI is one that is really dedicated to caring for the world. How do you think about artificial intelligence, especially after writing this character? [Portia Elan] I will say I started writing Haya before Chat GPT and sort of the LLM explosion. And so when I was writing them initially, it was really just engaging with that idea of the ultimate outsider. Now that we are living in the explosion of LLMs, you know, I feel a pretty profound distinction between a creation like Haya that as written really is conscious and is not wholly a robot. There's some living components to Haya. And then what we have access to via Chat GPT and Gemini and all of these, which are large language models that feel to me, I mean, it's just, it's all human created. There's nothing mystical to me about an LLM. It is human input guided by human programming. I don't know. To me, it's a reflection of the values of the creators and not something to be afraid of in the sense of, I'm not afraid that Chat GPT is going to take over the world. I am afraid that people are going to cede their intellectual curiosity and engagement with the world to LLMs. But that's, you know, I'm afraid of the human choices, not so much of the LLM choices. [Francesca Rheannon ] Yeah. And even in the terrifying scenarios, that's really a reflection of the human beings from which it is taking its lessons. Yes, absolutely. Back to care though, and this relates to the idea of choice in the book. The novel stretches across six centuries, but it continually returns to ordinary acts of kindness, acts of friendship and care. Are these the forces that you believe can actually shape history? Because this is very much related to the idea of story and how we create our own reality. [Portia Elan] I absolutely think that they are how we can change history. Those actions that we do every day. Of course, history is made up of politics and politicians and wars, and we live in the every day. We don't live inside history and in the way of the big events. We live in, I'm going to get up in the morning and what am I eating for breakfast? And how am I talking to the barista when I go buy my coffee? And all of those choices are sort of what make up not just our days, but our communities, our neighborhoods, our cities. And I think that when those things break down, those connections, those ability to care for one another, sort of in the, I'm going to smile at you on the street way. I'm going to let you merge in front of me in traffic way. That is what we mean when we say like society is falling apart or our community is falling apart. It's in that everyday experience of caring for one another. [Francesca Rheannon ] Yeah. I think of, oh, I remember going to this incredible Bernie Sanders rally in Queens in 2019, where he talked about love. I mean, love was the operative word for his politics. And it had a profound experience on me because I've never thought about politics in that way, but what he was doing was saying politics is a moral choice. And I think that's what you're saying in many ways in this book is that hope is a moral choice. [Portia Elan] I mean, if the other option is sort of hopelessness or despair, there's no future in that. And I don't mean hope in the book. And I hope that no one takes from the book that I mean everything is going to be okay if we just hope enough. But there has to be hope that things get better. It's really hard to find joy or connection or the energy to care for ourselves or the people around us if there's no hope. [Francesca Rheannon ] And that hope is an action. It's making the choices, I think, very much like the characters make in this book. I think especially of Yesico, who grapples with a profound moral dilemma. Who does she choose to protect? Or what does he choose to protect? She thinks she has to protect one thing by making one kind of choice, but then she finds out that that's not true at all. [Portia Elan] I mean, that is sort of the central moral choice of the book. And that first choice she's making on the surface might look altruistic and caring, but she's making it for selfish reasons. And the second choice that she makes is because it is the right thing for the whole community that she is a part of. And that's a big moral transition for her. Yeah. [Francesca Rheannon ] And I think that's part of what makes this book so powerful. Without spelling moral lessons out, it guides the reader to think about that larger community that we are actually part of and that we have a role in creating the future of. And so I want to thank you so much for writing a book like this because the lessons in it, the stories in it are ones that make us come to these conclusions rather than telling us what they are. [Portia Elan] Thank you so much. I'm so glad that the book has opened that up for you and has sort of given you that hope. [Francesca Rheannon ] Yes. Because the more people writing this way, the more we can create a reality of it in the world. [Portia Elan] Yes. That is my hope too, to be all of us less alone, more connected, more engaged in care for one another.