[Tom Lin] There is a, there's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy there, where if all of the things we can imagine about the future, I mean, to put it really bluntly, like if the futures that we imagine suck, it'll be difficult to dream of a way and to motivate ourselves and to kind of work out of that path where we do end up creating futures that suck. [Francesca] Tom Lynn, welcome to Writer's Voice. [Tom Lin] Thank you so much for having me, Francesca, it's a pleasure to be here. [Francesca] I loved this novel because it was beautifully written, and I also found it a wonderfully contemplative read. It made my mind go into various different directions. Some of the language was so beautiful and also was connected to a story that I found was very heartwarming. Sometimes heart-pumping stories are good, but so are other stories that carry you along in a way that just feels very enriching to the soul, and that's what I felt about this book. [Tom Lin] Thank you so much, that's really, really good to hear. I think my first novel was very action, heart-pounding, you know, a lot of movement, and I think for my second novel I wanted to challenge myself and try to tell a story that had that same kind of gravity but stayed in one place. [Francesca] So the novel follows Saul and May, those are the American names that they took, a Chinese immigrant couple who settled on an inherited 160-acre homestead in South Dakota after having suffered through the Cultural Revolution in China. They came maybe late 60s, early 70s. Soon after they come, the U.S. Army builds a nuclear missile silo on their land, and all kinds of strange things begin to happen. Tell us about Saul and May. [Tom Lin] I, as all writers do, I collect parts of my friends and family that I think are really interesting or moving, and then when I do actually try to write, I try to recombine those personalities into new people, but people that feel real because they have this kind of borrowed texture of actual people that I know. And so Saul and May are, they owe a lot to my grandparents. My grandfather, who passed away a few years ago, he had all of these stories about growing up in China, you know, being a farm kid. He was born in 1933, 1933, and he died just a couple days after his birthday. And I was struck by how different the world had become over the course of his life. And especially by the fact that he was born in China and he died in America. And to kind of have all of that contained in these 92 years that he lived, I felt like I owed it to him and to the stories that I had heard growing up to kind of recontextualize it and put those into a work of fiction that could carry, if not the facts of the matter, at least the emotions of it. And similarly with May, who's based in large part on my grandmother, but also, you know, I borrow some from my mom. Although, mom, if you're listening, it's all the good parts and none of the bad parts. But I was looking for characters that could carry the feeling of family legend, right? Where, you know, I think everyone's grandpa has told them a tall tale, like, you know, I shook hands with JFK, and you're like, I don't think so. But it's nice that we can think that. And I think that's the effect that I wanted to produce is that you like these two characters so much, you feel so close to them that truth becomes kind of a thing that you get to agree on with them. Right? And especially as these really fantastical or strange things begin happening in the story, I'd like to think that you are there with them for the ride. Like, nothing seems unbelievable, because you know these two people so well, you know their daughter Mara very well, and you feel just lucky to be involved and kind of seeing how their lives unfold, regardless of whether or not it is, you know, historically verifiable. There are a couple clues in there. But I think for most intents and purposes, it begins kind of, yeah, as you said, in the early to mid 70s, and extends through to a little into the near future. [Francesca] So, May secretly brings gold in with her from China, and Saul carries a bag of chrysanthemum seeds. Now, these become very critical to the story. The chrysanthemum seeds undergo a transformation when they reach Babylon, North Dakota. I had a feeling that gold is very important in Chinese culture. And I don't know anything about chrysanthemum seeds in Chinese culture, but were these metaphors in some ways? [Tom Lin] And that's a great question. I mean, I think that metaphors, for me, they have to earn their alternate meaning, right? But they have to be able to stand on their own two feet as the thing that they claim to be. And so that that secondary meaning is not necessarily like a code that you can crack, and then, you know, substitute, but it's actually something additional or supplemental that can sit on top of it. And so the gold is just gold and the chrysanthemum seeds are just chrysanthemum seeds. But as they persist and multiply and change alongside the family, I think they adopt these different alternate meanings. And whether those are transferable metaphors or easily substituted, for me, is a nice bonus. But I think it was most important for me to capture that feeling of like, these are real things in the world with them that they have to negotiate and kind of interact with. And if they acquire this meaning, it's only because they're around for so long. Like the chrysanthemums, you know, that Saul brings in the beginning of the book, they continue growing and they multiply and they diversify. And they're still there at the end of the book. And they are the same things that are descended from the plants that he brought over, but they're also different because they have been here for that long. And I think that idea of being changed just by being around, that you can never preserve everything as it is day to day forever. Like things will always change. And the familiarity that you build with that process of changes is what it is to get to know something or someone. And as for gold, I mean, it is very important in Chinese culture, all of the gold that my mother wears or whether it's like family gold, we actually had a lot that we kind of like saved up over the years, like little like trinkets and like pieces here and there. And then my mother's house was robbed a few years ago and they made off with all the gold. It was terrible, right? But also that's what happens when you keep a bunch of gold. But one of the only things that survived was this little ring that my grandmother had. And now I wear it. And I think like that's very cool as well. And this idea of gold as a store of value and gold as like something that is to be preserved and kept, but also passed on as a sign of like an heirloom. All of these things are interesting to me, but they're interesting to me as things in addition to the object itself, which is Mei has this gold and she knows that she can sell it for money, right? And Sol has these chrysanthemums and nobody wants to buy them at first. And in struggling with their thingness, right? Like their identity is just objects you can't really negotiate with. They become players in this story as well. [Francesca] And yes, you're right. For most of the novel, they were not so much metaphors, but when the chrysanthemums began growing deep into the earth, reaching back towards China itself, it seemed as if they were saying something about both connection with the past and transformation by creating roots in this new place in the future. [Tom Lin] Yeah, absolutely. And they do become instrumental to the last kind of movement of the book. And especially because the chrysanthemums are native to East Asia, right? And they're used to make tea. I make chrysanthemum tea many times. And the word chrysanthemum, that root chrysos actually comes from Greek for gold, right? And so there's a lot of like fun tie-ins there. But there's a very clear logic as to why we have this metaphor of putting down roots, right? When we settle places, because it does kind of tie you to a place. And I think to kind of make that into a plot point with the chrysanthemums was a very fun thing that I got to do. And I think it's also, this is very kind of specific, but there's a redbud tree in our yard. And every year it puts out, to me, it feels like a trillion little redbud saplings. And they're so difficult to pull because you can identify really easily and then you go to pull it and it's got this like giant taproot. It's as deep as it is tall. And so I was writing this book and I would take breaks and I would go out and garden, which essentially was just like identifying examples of the three weeds that I could recognize and pulling them. And I was just struck by these little plants that the first thing that they did was try to hold on so desperately and send out this giant taproot and be totally locked into the earth. And I think some of that made it into the story. [Francesca] Now, this is in the genre of magical realism. What attracted you to this genre? What did it allow you to do that straight fiction would not? [Tom Lin] That's a really good question. I like to think of the word surreal as a kind of gloss to how I feel that magical realism or fantasy elements should be handled, which is that surreal breaks out into, you know, sur and real and real obviously meaning real, but sur means beyond, right? It's from this kind of French root of like above or beyond. And I think that is the key because you don't discard the stuff that we're familiar with. We live in this world. Our feet are we walk around on the ground here. We breathe the air, right? This is where we live and love and die. And we get to experience these moments that seem out of this world, right? But I think crucially, they don't replace our experience here. They supplement it or they augment our ability to be sensitive to things that we might have missed, right? I think the power of magical realism is to introduce amazing things which are treated as totally ordinary, which I think I hope encourages people to think, well, what about my life that I actually do live is amazing and magical and lucky that I've gotten used to, right? To kind of see that balance between stuff that we can recognize and then like some kind of element of that, which has been transmuted or made beyond. It's beyond the real. But crucially, I think it sits on top of the real. It's here with us. [Francesca] You know, children are so much more open to that. I found it interesting that Mara, who is the daughter of Saul and May, is able as a young child to talk to animals. But it's a skill that fades as she gets older. And I think that there is a kind of a more porous relationship to the real and the surreal because I think the surreal in some ways is a plane of reality. [Tom Lin] Yeah. It was so fun to write Mara, right? Because it was so fun to kind of be a kid again and to try to think about the world as it appeared to me when I was six or nine or 12. And I think for Mara, she doesn't know the rules yet. She doesn't know what should and shouldn't be possible. And so anything that she experiences, it has absolute truth value because, well, she was there and she did it and she saw it, right? And she has a friend who tells her at one point in the book, tells her animals don't have souls. And Mara is like, no, that can't be true because I know that it's true. And I think that kind of surety, right? That like childish. I think it often comes across as naivete, but I think it really is a belief that the world is exactly as it appears. That you can trust things because that's how they present themselves to you. And I think losing that trust or that kind of confidence that the world would not dissemble to you or lie or try to trick you, right? But that the world is honest and that experience is honest. I think we can see Mara lose that trust in the world. And I think with that, she loses this ability to communicate with animals, which is, you know, like, is it in her head? Is she really communicating with animals? Like, who cares? Right? She does. And that's all we need. [Francesca] I was struck also that Saul, who is such a good, kind, and generous person, says that it's the biggest lie that people think he's a good, kind, and generous person. What were you trying to say there? People are not seeing who they really are and thinking that the best of them is a lie. Where does that come from? [Tom Lin] I think Saul is this kind of test case of, is it possible to be afraid and selfish and cruel and then to know that those things are not how you should behave and then to try so hard to be good? Does that make you a good person? And I think for Saul, he's tormented by this, right? He really, he feels that one day he will be found out that his instincts are always to run and to flee and to kind of cower. And in spite of that, he is brave, you know, when his family needs him, he does the right thing and he treats people kindly, but he's haunted by this fear. And I think you often hear in kind of contemporary context, like this idea that like, well, someone is a good person on the inside and they just made a mistake and they acted poorly, but they're good on the inside. And that kind of interior goodness is what counts. And I think Saul, for me, is this attempt at creating a character who we know his interior state, right? He believes himself to be cruel and selfish and unworthy of the love that he's gathered over the years, but he's good and he treats people well, right? And he's kind. And I think that for me is this kind of total inversion of, does it matter what someone is like on the inside if every time you interact with them and everything that they do is good, right? Can someone will themselves to be good? And for me, I think the answer is yes, because I think Saul is good. And I think his family does love him. And I think he has made a good impact on the people around him. And for me, that moment when he thinks of it as his biggest lie, I think is a great sympathetic moment because you think like, what would it take to convince you that you're good? There must be something like a switch that you have to throw inside, but no one can help you with because everyone believes that you're good too. [Francesca] And it's a spur to be a good person. [Tom Lin] Exactly. [Francesca] So we haven't yet talked about the key, the pivot around which this book rotates, which is that very soon after they move to Babylon, South Dakota, the army, the US army builds a missile silo on their land. They take over an acre and they build a missile silo. I kept on expecting some terrible thing to happen because of the nuclear warhead that I assumed was in the missile silo, but it's practically never mentioned. Instead, there's an other device, the Chinese device. What is it? [Tom Lin] So the Chinese device is a tool for negotiating between probabilities, as one of the characters puts it. It comes from this quite real, there's a way to interpret the equations of quantum physics where you can say, well, instead of these equations telling us that anything could happen and then one thing does happen, we can also interpret these equations to be telling us that everything does happen, just not here. We get one instance of something which could happen, but these things actually do happen somewhere else and they don't just disappear. And there's a range of thinking on to what extent this is just like a fun mathematical interpretive, it becomes very philosophical. And many people are like, well, it's just a curiosity, but the math works out. And one of the implications of this is that there is always a world, you know, it might be this one, but it might be any other one in an infinite number of worlds where stuff goes your way. You never get hurt. Everything comes up heads for you. And then there are even worlds in which you never die, right? Because how would you ever have subjective experience in a world where you don't exist? Well, surely you must always exist. And so the Chinese device is kind of based on this principle and this kind of famous thought experiment called quantum suicide, where someone who is sufficiently motivated and fanatical about this interpretation could prove it to himself by trying to kill themselves and proving that they always end up in a world where they live. And the Chinese device in the book is a machine that puts all of these people together. And so it ensures the survivability of the people who are manning the missile. It's part of deterrence, right? But all of this is like, it's out there. We never really talked to the people who make it. We never really talked to people who put it into practice. And it's very interesting when you say that, you know, once it's like Chekhov's nuclear missile, right? Like once the missile is in, you expect a war and it never comes. And I think the really interesting thing about that is that is our present reality, is that there are missile silos dotted all over the Great Plains with warheads in them. And they have targets loaded into them. And they haven't, God willing, right? They're still in their silos. We have submarines that prowl the oceans that are so secret that their locations are national security matters. They have nuclear missiles. They've never used them, right? And we hope that remains the case. But is our world transformed by having these things there, right? I interviewed landowners in South Dakota who had missile silos on their property in the past. And I was expecting, you know, the kind of stuff that you want to hear. You want to hear them say, well, it's arresting and it's magnificent or it's terrifying, right? And it changes how I live. You want them to say all this stuff. And by and large, the stuff that you get when you say, what is it like living next to a nuclear missile? They say, I have to remember to turn the harvester a little early so that I don't run into the fence. Or like, you know, that missile silo is annoying because like every couple of weeks, like somebody has to come and check on it. It's totally ordinary. [Francesca] Well, that's like a metaphor for living in the times that we're living in. [Tom Lin] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. [Francesca] Ordinary life goes on day to day, and yet we could be annihilated in any moment. [Tom Lin] Yeah. And I think that's the thing that I think is so interesting is that you want big things to feel big and to make big changes and to change the way you live. But we're very good at going on. We're really, really good at adapting. And I think when you're in one place surrounded by people who are very close to you, I think the question of to what extent does the outside world intrude on you, I think is one of them, is one of the ones that I'm interested in in this book. [Francesca] Well, we're too good at adapting. I mean, I remember speaking with Daniel Ellsberg about his book about the nuclear policy in the US. And he said it was just an unbelievable miracle that we hadn't blown ourselves up already. And it said in the bio blurb for you that you have a particular interest in sci-fi and nuclear weapons. Do you want to say a little more about that? [Tom Lin] Yeah. So I have a PhD from the University of California, which is focused on the role of science fiction in developing these very large technical systems. And so in the case of the one that I was studying, it was the Atlas nuclear missile. And I was interested in how in the span of only about 10 or 15 years, the aerospace industry went from thinking that such a thing was impossible, waste of money, total boondoggle, to it is the largest military industrial project in terms of employee counted dwarfs of the Manhattan Project. It's the most expensive thing we've ever done as a nation up to that point. And crucially, about a decade earlier, it was viewed as totally impossible. And so my research in my doctorate was to try to figure out what kind of mechanisms were responsible for convincing so many people and loosening the purse strings of so many hundreds of millions of dollars or billions now to making something that, I mean, even until as late as 1949, was being laughed out of the Pentagon for being too Buck Rogers. Buck Rogers is a science fiction comic strip that everybody read who worked in aerospace as a kid. They read it as a kid. And the conclusions that I got to were kind of they had they had Buck Rogers. It was actually like they had a common language and a common imaginary of what the future would be, right? They had this kind of ability also to hold their noses and work on, obviously, missiles, but to think of themselves as spaceship engineers, rocket designers, people who in doing the difficult and kind of ugly work of missile making today would be heralded as the people who had brought along the space age, right? These are people who wanted to live on Mars or to explore space and like laser guns and everything. And so that that is my interest is in how the worlds of fiction and the worlds of actual production intersect. And so I ended up getting interested in nuclear weapons. But I think these things are broadly true across modern high tech industry. [Francesca] Well, that's so interesting. You know, usually we think of reality giving rise to science fiction, not science fiction giving rise to reality, although in actuality, that's probably more often the occurrence than the reverse. I mean, just think of AI or think of iRobot, which was so many decades before now we have actual robots. [Tom Lin] Yeah, absolutely. And I think the funny thing is when you speak to the scientists and the engineers and you pitch this to them, you say, like, well, was there any influence between what you read and what you loved and what you made? By and large, the answer you get is absolutely not right there. I have a firewall in my brain between the kids stuff and the stuff that I'm working on. And actually, rockets are much more complicated. And of course they are. But many of them went into the field because they love rockets and they read comics as a kid, right? Many of them were able to continue working in the field because they could pass ideas back and forth using this kind of shared cultural memory of science fiction, right? When they go with the Pentagon and they pitch it and they get told, oh, it's too much like Buck Rogers, right? They're not like, what's that? And so I think what you find is that this firewall that so many of them think they have in their mind between fiction and reality, I think is actually quite porous and permissive to flow between the two domains. [Francesca] So we need a different kind of fiction in a way, because it sounds to me that that helps to keep them from thinking about the actual consequences of the weapons that they're developing. I mean, I've always wondered, how can these people develop things that can wipe out life on earth? [Tom Lin] How do they sleep at night, right? Yeah, that's the question. I agree. I think that's a really precise way of putting it. I think that we are living currently in an era with a kind of, I would say, dilapidated imaginary of the future, right? And I mean that in the sense of the people imagining our futures for us now, you know, like with the most kind of pressing forms of science fiction that they can commit billions of dollars to. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, right? Mark Zuckerberg. And because they're so wealthy and they have so much power, we're beholden to these kinds of terrible imaginaries of the future, right? Like where Elon Musk is, I think, you know, there's a line in his contract where if a million people live on Mars, you know, he becomes a trillionaire. That's absurd, right? Like that is just plainly crazy. And I think like one of the things that I'm interested in is science fiction that gets weird or that demands more of us than simply like we'll just do America in space, right? We'll just have every billionaire now will become a trillionaire once we mine asteroids. Like I think there's a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy there where if all of the things we can imagine about the future, I mean, to put it really bluntly, like if the futures that we imagine suck, it'll be difficult to dream of a way and to motivate ourselves and to kind of work out of that path where we do end up creating futures that suck. [Francesca] My son, who is a great aficionado of science fiction, hates dystopian fiction because he says it predisposes us. He thinks it's part of a psyops. You know, he thinks it's part of them trying to make us accept this dystopian future they're creating for us. [Tom Lin] Yeah, I mean, I think dystopian future is it's fun, but it's also like it's become not that significantly different from what we have currently. And so the fun of it is kind of, you know, like part of the fun is like, oh, that's awful. Like, can you imagine if like surveillance cameras could track you from your house to work and like figure out how much bread you bought at the store? And it's awful only if it's totally unimaginable. But now it really seems like wallowing or extravagance of woe. I'm interested in in works that really push us to think and that are difficult. And I like really fun, fast reads as well. But I find myself most entranced by science fiction that that is interested in not just imagining this world, but in the future, but actually imagining worlds of totally different orientations and interactions and kind of dynamics. [Francesca] Well, speaking of alternate worlds, Mae begins to create an alternate world of her own by means of painting doors to runes that don't exist in this one, but that she actually can disappear into. I mean, they're not fantasies in the novel. Sol sees her disappear into walls and go away until she ultimately disappears. But later on, again, back to the metaphor, this actually takes on the weight of a metaphor, very much reminds me of what happens when people prepare to die. [Tom Lin] Yeah, the way that Mae, you know, because as she's painting these alternate rooms and these doors in her own house, right? I mean, it begins as this kind of really, she's excited. They have a little bit of money. She wants to design. She wants to renovate. They're going to build the house that they always deserve to live in. And so she is just thrilled to be painting. Puts in a swimming pool. She puts in an observatory, right? She makes her own room larger. But I think as she also is kind of experiencing the early stages of dementia, and as she goes on and paints more rooms, she gets more and more forgetful. And I think for me, it was the feeling of what speaking to a loved one with dementia really is, is that they're here with you, that they're not forgetful. They're not forgetful in the sense of if you remind them, they'll recover it. They're forgetful in the sense that they seem to be here with us sometimes, and then other times they're irretrievable. And I think as it progresses, you feel that they spend more and more time out of reach. And I think that with letting Mae do that in the real world, where she isn't sitting in one place and her mind is wandering, she's wandering with her mind, allowed me to kind of think about what it means for us to be with the ones that we love as we begin to forget. What is it like to experience that and to go to these places and be surprised when no one is able to follow you, right? I love Mae. She's one of my favorite. I mean, they're all my favorite characters. But I think that was an ending for her that I felt was necessary. But I do feel bad for her. [Francesca] Well, this was such a pleasure to read. Babylon, South Dakota, Tom Lynn, it's just been a pleasure to talk with you about it. And I look forward to reading more books by you. [Tom Lin] Thank you so much, Francesca. I'm glad you liked it.