Annalee Newitz Transcript

BILLBOARD: 
[Francesca]
A critique of academia set in intergalactic space:
[Annalee Newitz: Their/They pronouns]
Right now we have a science system set up that's edging more and more toward science serving corporate interests like AI companies or serving government interests that are largely military. And that's something we've had a long time in the United States, like the military industrial complex, like that's a way of funding science. And that's why a lot of our science fits so nicely into a war program, or fits so nicely into making a bunch of expensive commodities that, you know, rich people can afford.

So these are all the kinds of questions that are swirling around for Garden Path, you know, is what is their research going to be used for? How can they present their research in a way that will make it pro social, instead of something that just benefits a few elite professors or a few elite business people. And that's, that's really the arc of the book.

I keep telling people, this is a book about transforming academia and transforming the university because the entire arc of my life has been to watch education in the United States be transformed in ways that are extremely negative. I've watched it over and over getting deprived of resources, like at the whole time I was growing up, my public school was getting less and less and less funding, and we had fewer resources and fewer classes. And we had music class, and then we didn't, we had art class, and then we didn't, we had free paper and pencils, and then we didn't.

And it was very stark. And, and I've watched the same thing happen to my colleagues who teach in university too. And especially now that so much science is being defunded or not funded. So that's what these characters are dealing with.

HOST INTRO:
[Francesca]
 -- And those characters are...highly intelligent slime molds. We talk with Annalee Newitz about their newest work of speculative fiction: "A Wall Is Also A Road." It's a charming, feel-good story that asks profound questions about the responsibility of science to choose ethics over self-interest. We also talk about their new novella, "Automatic Noodle." It's about a group of robots who dedicate themselves to mastering the art of noodle-making and create a diverse community motivated by joy along the way.

That’s all coming up on today’s Writer’s Voice, compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire, and inform. I’m Francesca Rheannon.

Anna Lee Newitz, welcome back to Writer's Voice. Thank you so much for having me back.

A Wall is Also a Road is such a richly imagined novel. Like all of your novels, you're incredible at world building and imagining life forms, structures, and civilizations that are so different from our own. And yet we care so much about because they really speak to I think what must be common, perhaps in all the universe, which is how do we care for each other?

What is love? What are our obligations? What's community?

Let's begin by orienting listeners to this extraordinary world you've created. Who is the protagonist Garden Path? What are the rational people?

And what sends Garden Path across the spigot, or as we know it, the Milky Way, the galaxy we're in to a planet inhabited by these strange beings they come to call the unnamed, who are of course, us.

[Annalee Newitz]
So Garden Path is modeled on a cellular slime mold. And of course, they're a grad student. And as a former grad student myself, I definitely had many slime mold moments in my life.

And Garden Path has come to a place that's called the rational memory. And the memory is a very elite graduate program that exists in this beautiful floating spire in the circumgalactic medium, which is the gas cloud surrounding our galaxy. And as you said, they call our galaxy the spigot.

And that's partly because all of their minerals and nutrients come from the galaxy because at the heart of our galaxy, quite famously, there's this giant black hole called Sagittarius A. And it's spitting out all kinds of material from gas to stars to water and all kinds of molecular delights. So the people, the rational people who live in this one area of the circumgalactic medium, they've named this the spigot because they're like, the galaxy is really only good for one thing, spitting out stuff that we want.

And they're a very, very ancient civilization. And I've actually written about them before in a short story that I published in Sunday Morning Transport. And that story was called A Hole in the Light.

And it was about what was happening to this particular group of people billions of years ago, earlier in the universe's life. But in this book, you don't have to worry about that. All you know, is that Garden Path wants to be a great scientist.

And at the memory among the rational people, there's really only one pathway to do that. And it's to pass all of your exams in grad school, which is very tough, and then to pass a final optional exam, which is to prove that you have discovered something completely novel in the course of your graduate studies. And so as a result, they decide to focus on an area of the galaxy, the galactic disk, that all of the people around them believe is basically just dead.

Because these are people who live in the gas surrounding the galaxy, they don't believe that life could evolve in the galactic plane where radiation levels are so high. The gravity well is crazy, it would like rip you apart. And so Garden Path's quest is viewed as being kind of bizarre and probably doomed to failure.

And however, Garden Path has these readings that they've taken from this weird little planet, kind of on the outer rim of the galaxy. And they think they see the molecular signatures of respiration, which is to say breathing. And that's the kind of thing that astronomers on Earth are dying to find on an exoplanet.

And we have seen it a couple of times in different kinds of atmospheric readings. We've seen things that could be the prototypes of the molecular signatures of life. So the goal would be to actually find something that looked like full-blown respiration.

And so of course, in this story, that's what they get. And they come to this planet and find these bizarre creatures who are so weird, that in their notes, Garden Path just calls them the unnamed. But to us, they're known as homo sapiens.

[Francesca]
Now, Garden Path as a slime mold is in a group of other graduate students. They get together every time they sleep, they merge, they heal each other, they interpenetrate. And that's how they keep going for a very, very long time, even lifetimes that are quite longer than ours.

One of them is Aureal, who becomes a good friend of Garden Path. And Aureal makes a powerful argument that caring about what you study doesn't necessarily compromise your scientific rigor. Their graduate study is in a planet where they are actually doing some research that is useful for the members of that planet.

They're restoring damaged land. And what they argue is that caring whether the land, crops, and communities survive, that it begins with caring for that. And this is very different than where scientific research for Garden Path is part of their personal ambition, their personal plans.

Aureal has a different view of caring. And I thought caring was really very much in the foundation of this novel. What does caring reveal to us that detachment as a scientist might prevent us from seeing?

[Annalee Newitz]
That's such a great question. And I'm really glad that you pulled that thread out of the novel, because I think that it is really important to how these characters approach what they're doing, and also how they approach each other. And this debate over whether it's rational to care about what you study, versus whether it's rational to be completely emotionally disengaged, or even maybe, in a certain sense, ethically disengaged from what you study, that really grows out of my own experiences when I was an academic.

And certainly, I was not studying human subjects. I was studying culture and politics. But I really remember distinctly one of my professors who I really looked up to, had written this book about a topic that I cared about very deeply.

And it was related to a topic that I was studying, which I also cared about very deeply. And she said to me, and I was like, Oh, wow, it must have been so interesting to be able to like, really dive into this and, and get to think about it a lot. And she said, Oh, yeah, I actually hate this thing that I was studying.

I really hate it. And she presented that to me as a benefit. And she said, Listen, you know, because I don't like it, it let me be more critical and have like more of an analytical lens on what I was studying.

And she was like, I would always only study things that I don't like. And I was like, wow, that just sounds horrible. I can't imagine wanting to do that.

And so I staged that. And that was not what I did. I did my doctoral work on at the time I was obsessed with horror stories.

And so I was writing about monstrosity and horror. And it allowed me to watch all these movies and read all these books that I really wanted to delve into. So.

So that's what my characters are doing is they're they're debating whether the scientific objects of their study are actually in fact, subjects, and they're just as much subjects as the scientists themselves. And they're in dialogue with each other. And that whatever you study is something that you should be not looking at from above, but looking at as a fellow person.

And as someone who may have specialized knowledge, but that knowledge could come back to enrich the community that is being subjected to the the microscope, essentially. So the question is really like, how does care fit into this story and that kind of care that emerges from scientific curiosity. And I think that's increasingly something that people are asking in academia is how do we bring care into education?

How do we stop pretending that to study something is to be removed from it and acknowledge our connection to it. And for these characters, partly that means, as Garden Path learns more and more about the unnamed more and more about us humans, um, they have to ask themselves really important ethical questions about what are they learning? What's their goal?

Are they helping the humans on earth? Are they actually, as one of the characters says, are they just a tourist who's kind of parachuting in getting a bunch of knowledge to enrich their own career and then leaving these people maybe even in a worse state than they were before? And, and each of the characters in the book is kind of grappling with that, like, what does it mean to care about what you're studying?

What does it mean to care about your community? How do you show up? And there's many different answers.

Some of the characters are just absolute shitheads. And we see kind of what we see what happens when you take rationality and the idea of emotional and ethical distance to it's not even logical conclusion, just to it's like logical midpoint, which is where a lot of universities are at this moment in the United States where we're kind of, we're removing care from education. And we're just saying education is transactional, it's something that you pay for, and it lets you get a middle class job.

It's not something that you do, in order to gain knowledge to help the world. So that idea is woven into the entire book, like how do these characters learn how to care about stuff?

[Francesca]
Yeah, exactly. And you know, what's so interesting for me as a former radio journalist, I mean, these are exactly the same kinds of controversies that obtain in journalism. On the one hand, journalists are supposed to be people who, you know, are voices of the voiceless and speak truth to power.

And on the other hand, you're supposed to be objective as a journalist and not put yourself in the story. And, you know, it's exactly the same. And I think care is a very useful way to think about these things, because it's really asking a kind of meta question, what are we doing here as human beings?

[Annalee Newitz]
Yeah. I mean, that is the ultimate question. And I think one of the ways into the story is to sort of look at it as like each of these characters, especially the grad students, they are kind of having the existential crisis that one has late in youth, when you're about to kind of enter the workforce or enter the period of your life where you're really considered a grown up and people like start depending on you to do grown up stuff, right?

And you kind of have to know what you want and who you think you are to do that. Not that any of us ever really figure that out completely. But there's a sense that there's this kind of bridge that you cross where you're like, on the other side, you're like, okay, I'm definitely a scientist, or I'm definitely a social worker, or I'm definitely like a degenerate gambler, or whatever you're going to be, right?

So that's, that was one of the joys for me of writing characters who are grad students, as opposed to I think a lot of academic books focus on high school and college where people are still kind of f***ing around and finding out. And in grad school, you're really supposed to be headed in a direction, you're supposed to know what you're going to study, and like what you're going to do. And you're really just like putting on the last bits of your armor before you go out into the field.

So I think there's a way in which academia becomes a metaphor for just growing up, you know, like, and especially grad school becomes this metaphor for what do you do in those last moments before you really have to start contributing, as opposed to just learning and being kind of a passive recipient. And so, you know, some of these characters, like Garden Path has had a really, as we discover throughout the novel, they've had a really tough history, they've had a really hard time finding community for a lot of different reasons. And one of those reasons is they're not really sure that they're completely rational, that the people that they live among call themselves rational, they're just one of many different species that live in that circum galactic medium.

And the rational people, of course, think that they're better than all the other people who live around them, the cloud people, and the photosynthesizer people and a bunch of other different folks who are all people. But Garden Path doesn't feel convinced of that argument, they don't feel like they're completely rational, they don't feel like they're one of those elite people. And they're not even sure that that makes sense that the idea of that some people are better than others, they're, they're kind of convinced of it, but they're kind of not.

And their experiences with humans really convince them that this idea that some people are better than others is complete bulls**t. And, and that's really what sets them on their path of being a person who is able to do really good science, actually, and able to really contribute to their community.

[Francesca]
And you mentioned before Garden Path's relationship with the humans or the unnamed, one in particular, whose name is Mertus. They live in, Mertus lives in Pompeii, just as we begin before Vesuvius erupts. And Garden Path finds themselves, they enter into a relationship with Mertus, which is from Mertus's point of view, quite a long one.

So it's a relationship that develops into genuine love. Yet they, Garden Path doesn't really initially recognize that they actually have enormous power over Mertus as a researcher from a technologically superior civilization. They are actually doing things for Mertus who they care about without Mertus's knowledge or even consent.

So how do you think about that line between, because I think this is a larger question, how do you think about the line between care and control, between protection and exploitation?

[Annalee Newitz]
I mean, again, this is one of the central questions of the book, and I don't feel that it's fully resolved. I didn't want to fully resolve it because I think it's one of those questions where there is this kind of gray area. And I do this to a lot of my characters, not just in A Wall is Also a Road, but in other books too, where they are kind of doing ethically sus things and stuff turns out okay, but they're regular, regular people.

They're not necessarily making the perfect decisions. And maybe in retrospect, they're going to regret those decisions later. But what happens with Garden Path is their species, as you mentioned, when they do what we would consider sleeping, they merge with each other and they clean out any kind of genetic mutations or toxins that are building up in their bodies.

And so that allows them to feel rested, but it also allows them to live much longer than a human who does accumulate a bunch of toxins and mutations and eventually also senescence and all the things that make my bones ache at the age of 57. So as Mertis and Garden Path grow closer, Garden Path secretly starts doing some of this work on Mertis while she's sleeping, and is clearing out toxins. And some of this grew out my research that I've done as a journalist where I was just looking at everyday life in Pompeii and interviewing archaeologists about what it would have been like to live there.

And of course, everyone in ancient Rome had stomach problems. Everybody had parasites. There's all this medical literature from the time about how to deal with diarrhea and how to deal with stomach ailments because they were eating food that was just like full of contaminants.

They also shared toilet paper, their favorite way to wipe their bums with was with a shared sponge. So people are just swapping all kinds of parasites all the time, in the name of cleanliness, actually, which is hilarious. And so Mertis, we understand very early on that she would have died many, many times if it weren't for Garden Path secretly doing this stuff to her that she never gets to consent to, which makes her life better.

But at the same time, when Garden Path does this stuff, I mean, this is two alien species that are now sharing some of their microbiome. And that could have been really dangerous. Garden Path could have killed Mertis, and they're trying to help.

But it's just lucky that they did. And like you said, they come from this much more advanced civilization. They have the ability to just leave at any time if things go bad with Mertis or if things go bad in Pompeii or on Earth, they can just go away.

And so they are struggling with what does it mean to they've come to Earth, they've started to study it, but now they're emotionally involved with one of the humans. And where do they draw the line? How do they say, okay, certain things I'm doing are just personal for me, certain things are for my research, I'm making decisions unilaterally, because I know what's best.

And honestly, I think some of the decisions they make are really bad. And there's one of the professors who's working with Garden Path says, like, you know, you really are f***ing up right now. Like you really are making some bad choices.

And Garden Path, partly because this is a romance, Garden Path feels like love is pulling them in this direction. And so then they have to figure out how do they separate their research from their romance, and they have a hard time with it. And it's, it's actually one of the central, I think, struggles in their, in their life.

But also, it's one of the central struggles in the book is how do we, you know, how do we navigate doing work, where there is inevitably some kind of hierarchy between people? And yet, how do we show respect for people that we do have something like where we have more knowledge than they do, or we have more access to resources. And like I said, I feel like this is a book that has some lucky breaks, and it has a happy ending, I don't mind saying.

And so things go right. But I really wanted to highlight to readers ways that could have gone wrong. And to get people thinking about how there's no perfect answer, but we can try to make good choices, even in a really imperfect system.

[Francesca]
And one of the ways in which they can go terribly wrong is that because Garden Path, and I won't go into the detail on this, but Garden Path hides the existence of human civilization. He like says that there may be life on this planet, but no mention of intelligent life that has a society. And he's doing that to protect the unnamed.

In fact, their name is the unnamed because he doesn't want to name them. And that becomes a bit of a problem later on, because in a way that signals there's something different. But by refusing to acknowledge Mertes as a person in the scientific record, he, she, they, I'm going to say that again.
I'm sorry.

[Annalee Newitz]
Yeah, I mean, they're a slime mold. So they don't really have gender.

[Francesca]
They also help to create the conditions in which the head of the scientific directorate, the head of the memory can exploit Mertes and can exploit the scientific discoveries. So, you know, it's kind of like the road to hell is paved by good intentions. But this sets up a real, I think, paradox in the book that in trying to hide knowledge, one can, in fact, in trying to protect, one can, in fact, make the objects of our protection more endangered.

[Annalee Newitz]
Yeah, more vulnerable.

[Francesca]
More vulnerable. And why is that? Tease that out for us a little bit.

[Annalee Newitz]
So part of what's going on with Garden Path is that they've discovered something that isn't supposed to exist. And they're only a grad student. So if they come back to their committee and say, I've discovered intelligent life on a planet in a place that is supposed to be dead.

So not only have they broken the rules by studying a planet that's supposed to be dead. And when I say broken the rules, all I mean is flying in the face of received scholarship, which is not really something grad students are supposed to do. You're supposed to kind of imbibe received scholarship and maybe embroider a little bit of nice stuff on top.

But you're not supposed to say, actually, all the old paradigms are wrong. Everybody got it totally wrong. So they're very afraid to say that they've discovered something so radically outside what had been predicted by science, because they want to get their degree.

And so they're afraid they'll be laughed out of the room. So there's a certain amount of hiding that they're doing purely out of self-preservation. But it is true that it has this knock-on effect, like you said, of because they're not acknowledging that humans are people, just like them, it puts Mertes in this position of being an object, just an object of study and an object of secret study.

So she's sort of doubly marginalized in the records of this civilization. And sometimes we know from Earth history, the only records of a marginalized civilization are often in the hands of the conquerors or in the hands of the group that has come in and colonized. And Garden Path is not on a mission of colonization.

There's no way that their people are ever going to colonize Earth because Earth is just incredibly, it's a hostile environment. But they are engaging in colonial knowledge gathering. So they're definitely extracting resources from Earth.

And as you said, later in the book, and I don't want to give too many spoilers, there is this threat that some of the things that they've discovered about humans, but also other life forms on Earth, basically all life forms on Earth could be used for nefarious ends by the extremely unethical head of the science division. So, again, I think part of what I'm trying to tease out here is thinking about what our moral and ethical obligations are when we study people. And, you know, we don't always have those same questions if you're, say, studying, you know, lasers or something, or if you're studying inanimate objects.

But I was gonna say, I saw you kind of had to look on your face like, well, I don't know. And I agree. Because I think, even if you're studying how coherent light works, that can have a social impact.

It could have a physical impact if you finally develop like really awesome laser weapons, for example. I'm just picking on lasers for because I have a friend who studies lasers, who is a very ethical scientist, by the way, and is not making weapons. But I think that that's something that often gets left out of the conversation about science is how does this, what is the social impact of what we're doing, but also


[Annalee Newitz]
Especially right now in the United States, what is our community's obligation to science too? Like how do we support science? Because the way that science is supported also affects the output.

So if a community comes together to support science, often the science that's produced is something that benefits the community. Like here where I live in the Bay Area in Oakland, there is a citizen science project to measure the pollution created at the docks in Oakland because trucks going back and forth doing delivery are putting tons of particulates into the environment, they're causing health problems and kids going to school nearby. And so community got together and put sensors out and did scientific research to figure out whether it was true that there was this elevated level of airborne toxins in their area, which yes there were, but then they had done the science and that science could then fold back into policymaking in the community to try to make the air more healthy and to try to divert those trucks from going through neighborhoods where people live.

So I think right now we have a science system set up that's edging more and more toward science serving corporate interests like AI companies or serving government interests that are largely military. And that's something we've had a long time in the United States, like the military industrial complex, like that's a way of funding science. It's why a lot of our science fits so nicely into a war program or fits so nicely into making a bunch of expensive commodities that rich people can afford.

So these are all the kinds of questions that are swirling around for Garden Path, is what is their research gonna be used for? How can they present their research in a way that will make it pro-social instead of something that just benefits a few elite professors or a few elite business people? And that's really the arc of the book.

I mean, I keep telling people, this is a book about transforming academia and transforming the university because the entire arc of my life has been to watch education in the United States be transformed in ways that are extremely negative. I've watched it over and over getting deprived of resources. Like the whole time I was growing up, my public school was getting less and less and less funding and we had fewer resources and fewer classes and we had music class and then we didn't.

We had art class and then we didn't. We had free paper and pencils and then we didn't. And it was very stark.

And I've watched the same thing happen to my colleagues who teach in university too. And especially now that so much science is being defunded or not funded. So that's what these characters are dealing with.

And I think it was my pleasure and kind of my wish fulfillment in this book to see one group of people figure out a solution and try to build an alternative to the university system as they've experienced it. And in that way, again, there's a happy ending. There's a solution that these characters come up with, but it's also left extremely open as to whether this is a widespread reform or if this is just like one little group of people and they're like, we founded, the new school for social research and we're gonna have just this little group of people who are doing really great work, but everybody else is gonna keep building bombs.

We don't know.

[Francesca]
I'm glad that you mentioned AI and it interested me that you took it from the question of who's doing the funding and how does that determine what happens? I mean, it is interesting that the internet was actually created by DARPA, the Defense, I don't know what the A is.

[Annalee Newitz]
Advanced Research Projects, yeah.

[Francesca]
And yet the people who developed it really had this sense that this was going to bring the world together. This was going to be a communal thing. It was gonna be a, it was kind of a hippie, dippy anarchist.

Kind of project that was going to help humanity and it got taken over by the corporations, of course. What are the responsibility? Of course, we have to think about the responsibility of society towards science, but what is the responsibility of the scientist towards society?

[Annalee Newitz]
I mean, I think that the responsibility is to always be thinking about the social and cultural impact of what they're doing. And it's very hard because the way that our universities are structured is that all of these kinds of questions are very siloed. So maybe over in the humanities world, people are asking questions about how science impacts society or maybe in sociology departments or even philosophy departments.

But in science departments, they're just trying to do something that they think of as isolated from social issues. Oftentimes, I mean, this is not all scientists, but that is how science is taught. It's also how humanities is taught.

I mean, I came up in a humanities tradition and we were not taught to appreciate at all how science worked. We were taught to critique science without ever understanding what the stakes were. And it's one of the reasons I actually left academia because I was so sick of being told that humanities people could critique something they didn't even understand.

So I went and tried to understand science as best I could. And so I think that we see today, we're seeing glimpses of a more hopeful model where scientists are being encouraged to, for example, people working in biotech, people working on biological engineering are often encouraged in their papers and publications to build in a section about safety. And how do you keep these products from causing disease or having unintended consequences?

And I think that's a really good start. I think that's like one little crack in the door of thinking about not just does the product, does the experiment work? But if it does work, what could happen to people?

And that's the next step. It's always thinking about the possible unintended consequences. And I think we need to be doing that throughout technological development as well as scientific, encouraging people in private companies, companies that are developing LLMs and developing autonomous cars and all of these devices that are kind of powered by what we're calling AI, which is just kind of a buzzword.

We need to be asking these companies to truly, and the people working in them, to truly grapple with the impact of what they're doing. I mean, one of the things that's very encouraging is seeing people protesting data centers. And data centers are kind of an unintended consequence of the development of these AI models that takes so much compute power.

And it's not that nobody predicted we would need data centers. I mean, we've had server farms for a long time, but the number we would need, the consequences for the communities where they exist, the amount of energy they require, nobody had spun up an experiment about what happens if you plonk a data center into a remote community's energy grid? Like what happens to the community?

Nobody asked that question. They were like, oh, is the power there? Great, all we have to do is suck all the power away from everyone else and that's fine.

And that's an example of thinking purely as if there are no cultural or social consequences to your science, right? Like I did the math, the power is there, but you're not thinking about like, okay, but what about everybody else who needs the power? What about the humans in the community?

How did they feel about hearing like weird, high-pitched whining noises all night and having electric bells that are like astronomically high? And a lot of these problems that we're facing really could be solved if we had a robust conversation between people doing science and tech, people who have expertise in the humanities, in political science, in ethics, truly having a conversation about what's going to be developed before it's developed. I would love to see more of that.

I would love to see not just a few ethicists here and there employed by AI companies to tell them what happens if they suddenly discover that AI is sentient. I want them to be people who are like community leaders, experts in human civilization, telling them what happens when a wealthy company parachutes into a community and takes all of the community's resources. I think those are the people they need to be talking to.

[Francesca]
Here, here is all I can say. I mean, that is really the fundamental question we're facing and an existential one at this point. And that leads me to the solutions because what you talk about in this wonderful novel, a wall is also a road, is that title is part of what you are pointing to in terms of solutions.

I mean, we could see the wall as the thing that separates science from ethics. We could see the wall as what separates people from each other, the conquering and the conquered, all those divisions. And yet what you are really talking about in this novel, Anneli Newitz, is how do we find in those barriers a pathway to solutions?

So say a little bit more about that. What is the solution you're pointing to where the wall becomes a road?

[Annalee Newitz]
Well, there's a lot of, as you said, there's a lot of barriers that my characters are dealing with in this book. And there's a lot of artificial boundaries that have been set up, a lot of borders that have been set up. One of the reasons that it was really a pleasure for me to locate a large part of this novel in ancient Roman civilization was because a lot of our ideas about empire and statehood in the West come from what we imagine happened in Rome.

And oftentimes our leaders kind of harken back to Rome. And I think one of the solutions really is just the fundamental truth that borders are bullshit, that what we think of, that the boundaries that we have around us are often created artificially by people with power who want to prevent us from forming communities where we can resist authoritarian leaders or where we can resist bad policy or bad governance. And so really the solution in this novel for all of the characters is to find allies and to reach across borders and to say, nope, I'm not gonna respect this border because it's not a respectable thing to do.

There's no honor in borders.

[Francesca]
I so agree. I mean, if we'd had borders, we wouldn't have had ourselves, you know, human beings.

[Annalee Newitz]
Yeah, I do respect like cellular membranes as a border. Like that I respect. But yeah, not all the ones that we invented.

[Francesca]
And that brings me also, I think, to a theme that that shares with your novella, Automatic Noodle, which is just a charming book. And, you know, just kind of makes you feel really good to read because it also, like a wall is also a road, it interrogates the idea of what is a person and how are people who are different iterations of person are able to share with each other and create community with each other. So just give us a little bit about what Automatic Noodle is about.

And then I'll ask you a couple of questions about it.

[Annalee Newitz]
So Automatic Noodle is set five years after California has won a war of independence against the United States. And the new nation of California has won this war partly with the help of robots. And as a result, the new president has decreed that a certain class of robots, the ones that they believe have the highest intelligence that they have a limited number of rights.

So they're granted kind of a provisional citizenship in the nation of California. So they're free to work and make money, but they're not free to have bank accounts. They're not free to organize unions.

They're not free to marry. They're not free to own property. And these are all rules that, you know, anyone who's been an immigrant to the States or who's descended from enslaved people in the States, these are rules you're pretty familiar with.

They're ones that humans have imposed on other humans over and over in our nation's history. So that's what's happening in California. And the main characters are four robots who have been employed in a ghost kitchen.

And their owners, not owners, sorry, their employers, their employers kind of disappear for reasons. And so they decided to sneakily figure out a way to take over the restaurant and make really good food, not ghost kitchen food, but like food from the heart. So they start making biang biang noodles.

And it's just about how they keep the restaurant open, how they deal with robophobia from their neighbors, how they kind of circumvent red tape, and also how they kind of become friends with each other and how they recover from the war. And so it's very much about tasty noodles, but also, yeah, what it means to be part of a community, even if you're really different from other people in it.

[Francesca]
And one of the things that's interesting, too, is, well, Hands is a robot who can't eat. I mean, robots are not, don't eat. Yet making noodles becomes a craft that they care passionately about.

And when the restaurant is attacked by some robophobes, the bots begin asking whether, do they even have a culture, you know? And one of the other robots, who is Kaien, suggests that maybe they make culture out of everything. So talk about the idea of culture out of everything, about doing things that you maybe are taking pride in doing something that doesn't come from your culture, per se, but that gives you deep satisfaction, as Hands does.

You know, which I think is very much at the heart of this novel is the pride in work, the satisfaction, you know, what autonomy actually means to these bots. I guess it's kind of a lot mishmashed together, but it's connected.

[Annalee Newitz]
Yeah, I mean, I do think that pride in work and kind of earning your place in a community through work is a big theme for me in a lot of my books. It's very clear in Automatic Noodle. And that is one of the things I really wanted to explore is the way that a robot like Hands can enjoy doing work, even if, like, their job is they're making noodles for other people to eat, right?

So they don't get to eat their own noodles. In fact, they can't, as you said. They do have an exquisite sense of touch.

So they're really good with dough, which is, again, full wish fulfillment on my part, because I'm really bad with dough. So I'm like, what would it be like if I could actually feel how ready the dough was for making whatever I'm making? So, but that's, for Hands, that's part of the pleasure is figuring out when the dough is ready to be stretched for the noodles and really knowing what it feels like to prove a piece of dough.

And even though they aren't eating the food, they're giving the food to other people or they're selling the food to other people, that becomes, for them, a reward, because they see the enjoyment that other people have in it. And I think that's a really beautiful way to think about how communities form is when we do kind things for each other. It doesn't necessarily mean we do them for free, like I do a kind thing for you, maybe you give me money, or maybe you give me something in return.

But that's kind of a very gentle version of the social contract, not so much that we have a transactional relationship, we have a gift relationship. And the more that we do things for each other, the more we trust each other and the more we feel connected. And that's really what this story is about is how that iterative process of doing kind things for each other builds that helps the robots integrate into their neighborhood.

And of course, there's all these forces in the neighborhood that don't want them there. And there's a lot of propaganda in the new nation of California about how robots are just machines and they aren't like humans, they don't have culture or society. And so that's what leads to the robots kind of anxiety about like, wait, are we anything?

Like, we're making these amazing noodles from China, we have no connection to China, really, we have no connection to food, we aren't really people, we're like making this thing that only humans like. But then they kind of come to realize that they actually are participating in culture by doing this exchange of beautiful things that they're making. And I just started the sequel to Automatic Noodle and it's gonna actually delve into those questions a little bit more.

And I think, I hope in a satisfying way.

[Francesca]
Oh, I would love to connect with you on that, follow that conversation. You know, one of the things that both books share, Automatic Noodle and The Wallows Also Rode, Annalee Newitz is a way of looking at human beings from the vantage point of something quite alien to human beings. What did creating, you know, one book, The Civilization of Slime Molds, and in the second book, this community of robots, help you to understand about people?

[Annalee Newitz]
Oh, that's a really good question. I think part of what I wanted to do was help readers see some of the ordinary common sense things that we do as humans and see them from the outside and realize like how completely strange they are, how arbitrary they are, and to start questioning them, you know? So I think one of the things that's really fun about writing a non-human character is building up the way they see the world and touch the world and experience it.

So I love characters who have bodies that function really differently from humans or like senses that humans don't have to remind my human readers, hey, you're seeing just a teeny slice of reality. Like we only see visible light, which is just the most ridiculously tiny, tiny part of the spectrum. And that's just one piece of how little we see, I guess is what I mean, or how little we experience of the world.

And we shut ourselves off to a lot of experiences too, because we assume oftentimes that what humans experience is like the most important stuff or like the only stuff. And so when you have robots that can taste the particles in the air or you have a slime mold who can reach inside your body and like touch your cells and sort of examine the pieces of you that make up your entire body, it makes you start questioning everything, I think. And that's questioning everything, questioning the way we treat each other, questioning our rituals and who we are, that's the first step toward changing.

And we really need, I really need models for change. I really feel like we're at a moment culturally where a lot of people are feeling really stuck. Like there's no way to get out of these traps that we've made for ourselves.

And the fact is you can, you just need to try another perspective and look at history from a different vantage point. And aliens and robots are a great way to do that. Another great way to do that is just read books written by people from places that are really different from where you grew up or people who have a really different experience, people who are a different race or gender from you and just get their perspective on what's going on because that can also be a huge shift in how we see things is to say, oh, wait, you mean like as a white Enby, like I don't see everything?

I don't see the reality of all of the world. Oh, there's a whole other way of looking at this. I mean, and that's kind of like how democracy is supposed to work.

Like we're all supposed to be able to kind of bring our perspectives to the table and work out a compromise. And so that's sort of my grandiose plan is to just kind of like nudge us in the direction of having a little distance on what we're doing and thinking about ways we could change by just shifting our perspective.

[Francesca]
Yeah, and that really makes me think of what the Reverend William Barber and many others talk about as the beloved community. And I think both books really are driving to that place, both in a wall is also a road, a beloved community is created where people support each other. And the same as an automatic noodle.

And I think that's what makes these books so soul satisfying to read. I mean, they're intellectually satisfying. They are really, they make you think about things.

I mean, for one thing, I had never thought about robo-phobes and I think that's gonna become a real phenomenon actually if we don't have autonomous robots. So they're intellectually satisfying, but it's that moral satisfaction, that satisfaction of people working together and creating community that is so beautiful in your work. And I wanna thank you so much for reminding us about that and for talking with us about it.

[Annalee Newitz]
Yeah, thank you again for having me.

[Francesca] Annalee Newitz. The sequel to Automatic Noodle is slated to be published in October 2027.