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Hi, welcome to another session on WIRED.
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I'm Adam Rogers, Senior Correspondent at the publication,
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the magazine and the website and I am delighted
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to welcome one of my favorite science fiction writers,
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Neal Stephenson.
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Thank you for being with us, Neal.
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We really appreciate it.
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Hi Adam, good to be here.
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So, Neal has a new book coming out the 13th,
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was my counts next week called Termination Shock.
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It's always Tuesday for some reason,
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it's an ancient ritual the 16th, I guess.
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So, that's mostly what we're going to talk about,
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but want to start with a question
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that I warned you I was going to ask about to begin with
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and that everyone has been asking you about
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for the last couple of weeks, at least.
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This is my 1992 copy of Snow Crash.
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Oh, that's a beauty.
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This is the classic one that I picked up
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that summer when I would go to the bookstore to hide
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from the job that I had at lunch hour.
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And there's this paragraph on page 22.
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After you've spent a couple of pages describing
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the experience of what we would today,
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probably call virtual reality,
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of wearing a set of goggles that images are being beamed in
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onto the screens of the goggles
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and stereo sound being beamed to the headphones,
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Main character's name is Hiro.
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Hiro is not actually here at all,
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he's in a computer generated universe
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this computer is drawing onto his goggles
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and pumping into his earphones
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and the lingo of this imaginary place
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is known as the Metaverse.
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This is your coinage.
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Sorry to read this back to you,
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I know you know the book better than most would
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but now the Metaverse has been adopted,
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not perhaps as the caution maybe that you meant,
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but as the next big business opportunity
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in social media, at least.
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And I know that you're not involved
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in the business side of that,
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but I do want to know what you feel
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about whether these folks,
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I don't know read the book before
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they called something the Metaverse.
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How does that feel for you to have that coinage?
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Well, the overall tone of the book
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as many people have pointed out
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is kind of broadly dystopian.
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Although it's meant to be dystopian with a sense of humor,
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it's both dystopian and kind of satirizing
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the dystopian tropes of the genre at the same time.
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And so when people are arguing about the Metaverse,
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in the last few weeks and months,
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there's a tendency for the more skeptical people
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to point to that dystopian quality of the book,
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as saying something or meaning something
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about the Metaverse as being currently worked on
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by active tech companies.
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So I get it, I think that in the book,
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the Metaverse per se is not, neither dystopian nor utopian,
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I mean, it's a thing that exists in that world
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and people use it frequently as a way to sort of step out
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of the possibly kind of gloomy dystopian lives
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that they might be living.
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That's certainly what Hiro is described as doing
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in the passage that you're reading.
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He is in real life,
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living in a storage container by the airport,
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but in the Metaverse,
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he gets to have a more full and beautiful experience.
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So I think the Metaverse as described in the book
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is kind of neutral,
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it's neither dystopian nor utopian.
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That gather is what people do with the idea.
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We're going to talk about that,
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the neutrality or dystopian utopian idea thing more
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because I think it's important to Termination Shock too,
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you can tell it's science fiction in Snow Crash
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because they've actually...
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Somebody has actually built housing near the airport
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for Hiro to live in.
Yeah.
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Which of course doesn't happen in real life,
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nobody has that,
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now, he can afford a place to live,
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so clearly your predictive abilities are winning.
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Imperfect, yeah.
Great.
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That's right.
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Your Termination Shock is broadly about climate change,
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about global warming and about a billionaire decides
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to attempt solar geoengineering,
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this really aggressive program
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of shooting sulphur into the atmosphere
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to try to cool off a planet that is in Termination Shock
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is well past the point where places
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are not livable for humans.
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And I'm just wondering, just thinking about,
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as you mentioned dystopias and utopias,
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is it your intent to pitch that in a way
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as what ought to happen or should happen
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or are you aspiring there to some neutrality as well?
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What's your hope that people will take away from this vision
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of like climate change is happening
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and now somebody's got to do something about it.
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Well, the overall tone of the book,
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if you read the book all the way through,
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is reasonably balanced.
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So at the beginning of the book
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the program you're describing
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is already sort of a fait complete.
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Not everyone knows about it,
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but it's about to start running
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and so most of the book is really on the topic
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of how people around the world from different countries
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and different walks of life
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respond to what this guy is doing,
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and, so in the course of that,
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they talk about the pros and cons
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of this kind of geoengineering in what I hope
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is a reasonably well-informed way.
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They're intelligent people
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who have access to good information
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and so they're able to anticipate
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the possible problems that are going to result
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from that kind of intervention
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and to make their own decisions
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as to how they should respond to it.
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So I hope I've depicted all of that in a reasonably balanced
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and realistic way.
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The particular scenario in which an individual,
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a billionaire decides to do this,
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I think probably it's not super realistic
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for various reasons but it may for a good story.
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I think that if this kind of intervention does happen,
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is likely to be a government somewhere
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that just decides it's in its own national interest
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to go ahead and pull the trigger on this.
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I wasn't trying to put you on the spot
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for saying that it should be neutral,
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part of the thing that you've done just by talking about it,
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is saying yes climate change is real,
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yes, it's an issue, it's a problem,
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and where we sit right now
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with COP26 going on the large international program,
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of trying to address climate change
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while there are still people out
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there don't think it's really a problem
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or who don't think that it's visible
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to do anything about it,
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or willing to sacrifice some number of...
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Some amount of coastline and some number of people to it.
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This book takes that as a given,
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this is an issue it's serious.
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And geoengineering is a controversial solution
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or approach to it
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but I am...
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When you say it's neutral,
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I'm struck by it, 10 years ago you wrote an article,
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Wired written it too.
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You're one of the few people who've both written for Wired
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and had Wired write about.
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Where you said that in the golden age of science fiction,
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normally start at 30s, 40s, 50s.
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Science fiction writers wrote
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these big idea books with big technological solutions
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and now that those are what's needed.
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Well, would you say the imperative
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to develop new technologies
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and implement them on rock scale
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no longer seems like the childish preoccupation
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with funerals with slide rules.
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It's time for the SF writers,
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to science fiction writers to start pulling their weight
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and supplying big visions that make sense.
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So is this a big vision?
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Is this one of those, you've described them as hieroglyphs?
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Yeah, it could be, I mean
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it's the situation that we're in,
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I think sometimes isn't fully understood even by people
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who think of themselves as environmentally aware
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and staying in touch with what's going on with climate,
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the parts for million of CO2 in the air
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is now well above 400
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that's the highest it's been for millions of years
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and it's up from 200 and something
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before the industrial revolution.
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So it's a big change
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and the various efforts that are being made
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to reduce emissions are great,
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and we absolutely have to do those things,
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but I'm not sure if everyone totally gets the fact that even
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if we brought emissions of new carbon dioxide down to zero,
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which is something that cannot happen realistically
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for several decades into the future,
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that wouldn't reduce the amount of CO2
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that's already in the atmosphere.
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It takes something like a million years
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for natural processes to bring that number back down
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to the pre-industrial revolution level,
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and so we need carbon capture on an enormous scale
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in order to achieve that.
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And I hope...
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We have to do that,
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that's the big solution that we really need to implement,
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and it truly is a solution in the sense that
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it would get rid of the underlying problem
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and undo the mistake that we made by putting all that CO2
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into the atmosphere in the first place.
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I think that between now
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and when those carbon capture programs actually begin
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to make a positive impact period of time during
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which some really bad things are going to happen,
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geopolitically as the result of all that CO2 in the air.
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I think we're going to see mass fatality events
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when the weather gets too hot and humid
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to support human life.
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In certain areas we're going to see large rise in sea level
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that's going to create refugee problems
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and resulting famine and war and strive.
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And so these kinds of...
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It's like solar geoengineering schemes
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are something that could be considered
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as a sort of tourniquet.
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It's like putting a tourniquet on
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a grievously wounded limb in order
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to keep patients alive long at the emergency room.
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You don't want to leave the tourniquet on,
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but it may be necessary save a person's life
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in the meantime.
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Because when we talked for the story
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that I wrote about the book,
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you, one of the things that you said was that
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there's a reticence even maybe even,
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especially among progressives among the left
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to have technological solutions
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and like science fiction as a genre
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there are some expectation,
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I don't know that it's totally right.
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That a technological solution will be sort of
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the dental monte or the inciting event and your case.
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In the case of Termination hock for the story.
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But there's this concern like
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any technological solution here
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is worse than a stop gap, it's moral hazard, right.
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And so I don't know if that's something
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that you can ask a science fiction story,
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to get you out of it maybe just makes
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the science fiction story interesting.
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I don't mean to put you on the spot to solve global warming
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so much as to try to figure out like what the role
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of the fiction writers and even of the journalists,
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if you have any advice,
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is to try to deal with this existential issue.
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Well, I mean it begins with a story
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in the case of what you did in the case
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of a journalistic piece
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and then what matters is where the story goes
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and what the characters do.
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So I guess, as I mentioned before
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most of the termination shock is about how people respond
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when one person does decide to intervene
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in the global climate.
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'Cause in a weird way the surprising thing
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in real life is the people
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who decide not to intervene, right?
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Is that with climate change-
Yeah.
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The people who don't believe it's an issue
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who don't waste time dealing with it
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and even with the pandemic the shocking thing
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about COVID-19 was more of the people
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who for political or other reasons said it wasn't a problem,
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it's not a big deal.
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I mean, that's sort of a surprising moment, I think for...
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Yeah, even after Trump and everything else,
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I did not see that coming the idea that
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we could have a pandemic I mean,
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by this point has killed going on twice
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as many Americans
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as died in World War II and in a much shorter span of time.
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And yet there's still a sizable number of people
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in this country who don't even it's real.
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So when the pandemic started
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it didn't occur to me that could ever happen,
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but the polarization of opinion and the ability of people
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to live in world off kind of bubbles
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has advanced to the point
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where even there been many cases reported
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the people who are literally dying of COVID.
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Lying there in the hospital bed,
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being intubated insisting with literally
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their last words saying that it's all a hoax.
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So when I see that and then I look at climate change,
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climate change far, far more abstract
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and difficult scientific concept
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to understand even for
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a scientifically kind of educated people
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than a pandemic that kills people all around you
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and the consequences are much further away
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and much more abstract than having a friend
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or a neighbor or a loved one gets sick
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or die of this disease.
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And so, you have to be pretty realistic,
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which means-
Right.
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Pessimistic about the possibility that large numbers
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of people are going to believe
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in a human created climate change
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to the point where they would all get together
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and support expensive and difficult
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and complicated measures to reduce emissions,
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to set up carbon capture facilities on a massive scale,
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or what have here.
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There's a question from one
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of the folks watching that's relevant here,
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So I want to go to that some of the time we have remaining,
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this is Audrey from Russia,
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says yesterday, one time Apple designer,
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industrial designer, Jony Ive,
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was on WIRED and was talking about Steve jobs
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and that case, being a leader
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for change and that's one thing
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when it comes to running a company especially in technology,
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but Audrey ask "what you think the role
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of individual leadership here?"
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If there are specific individuals who you think are,
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particularly important versus that collective action that.
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You were just talking about.
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Yeah.
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Well, we've gotten into a really weird place
333
00:17:24.180 --> 00:17:27.670
in how things work in our society,
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where billionaires are the answer to everything.
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So 50 years ago,
336
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if something big needed to happen,
337
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we would look to the government,
338
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or we would look to private industry
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to take care of it for us somehow.
340
00:17:47.790 --> 00:17:52.790
And now the expectation that a lot of people just seem
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to have is that, if there's a big thing
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is that needs to be done then a billionaire needs
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to step in and handle it for us.
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And that is kind of a new thing in the world,
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and it seems to be where we are,
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and that's why I chose that particular trope
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as the basis for Termination Shock.
348
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But you've by dative through your work
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and through the kind of things that you've done,
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even when you're not writing you met some of these guys,
351
00:18:31.460 --> 00:18:35.720
I think all, it almost all men in your estimation
352
00:18:35.720 --> 00:18:37.840
of the I don't know which billionaire
353
00:18:37.840 --> 00:18:39.980
I should be talking about specifically.
354
00:18:39.980 --> 00:18:40.950
In your estimation,
355
00:18:40.950 --> 00:18:43.509
is that are they up to that task?
356
00:18:43.509 --> 00:18:44.967
It seemed to me that the kind of thing,
357
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kind of personality one has to have
358
00:18:47.460 --> 00:18:49.270
to acquire more than a billion dollars,
359
00:18:49.270 --> 00:18:53.180
may preclude helping people who haven't acquired more than
360
00:18:53.180 --> 00:18:54.013
a billion dollars
361
00:18:54.013 --> 00:18:55.163
so I wonder if you agree.
362
00:18:56.240 --> 00:18:58.840
It turns out there's a lot of billionaires besides
363
00:18:58.840 --> 00:19:01.578
the famous once person like,
364
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I mean, I can't even believe on his term,
365
00:19:05.820 --> 00:19:08.440 line:15%
but there's like dessa billionaires.
366
00:19:08.440 --> 00:19:10.910 line:15%
We tend to look at the center millionaires
367
00:19:12.227 --> 00:19:16.743
as convinced on outside the people who only have
368
00:19:17.975 --> 00:19:21.390
$1 billion or $12 billion
369
00:19:21.390 --> 00:19:24.123
or something like that we never hear about.
370
00:19:25.790 --> 00:19:29.130
And I think a lot of people who do have
371
00:19:29.130 --> 00:19:32.500
that kind of money lying around actually do make efforts
372
00:19:32.500 --> 00:19:37.500
to apply that money in a beneficial way.
373
00:19:37.970 --> 00:19:40.730
They're not all sociopaths
374
00:19:40.730 --> 00:19:45.730
so they have the same kind of emotional life as anyone else
375
00:19:47.700 --> 00:19:51.053
and so why wouldn't you want to apply,
376
00:19:52.110 --> 00:19:53.520
apply that money in a way
377
00:19:53.520 --> 00:19:56.750
that you think is going to make things better?
378
00:19:56.750 --> 00:19:59.130
In the particular case of Termination shock,
379
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I had to posit the existence of
380
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a center or a dessamillionaire that nobody's really heard of
381
00:20:05.321 --> 00:20:07.420 line:15%
in Texas,
382
00:20:07.420 --> 00:20:10.310 line:15%
who comes from a background in the oil, gas,
383
00:20:10.310 --> 00:20:11.950 line:15%
and mining industry.
384
00:20:11.950 --> 00:20:15.703 line:15%
And so parlayed that into a chain of gas stations,
385
00:20:16.580 --> 00:20:18.630
so I'm kind of bending over backwards
386
00:20:18.630 --> 00:20:20.470
in other words, to make it obvious that
387
00:20:20.470 --> 00:20:22.860
my fictional billionaire is not meant
388
00:20:22.860 --> 00:20:27.210
to be a thinly veiled depiction
389
00:20:27.210 --> 00:20:32.210
of any real billionaire, but he does what he does.
390
00:20:33.990 --> 00:20:37.100
He has a story for why he does this,
391
00:20:37.100 --> 00:20:40.370
that is based on a kind of economic argument.
392
00:20:40.370 --> 00:20:43.280
And he's got investments in Houston Real Estate,
393
00:20:43.280 --> 00:20:46.460
that's being the value of which is being depressed
394
00:20:46.460 --> 00:20:51.130
by a rising sea level and severe work over,
395
00:20:51.130 --> 00:20:55.253
and he figures that by implementing this scheme,
396
00:20:57.240 --> 00:20:59.810
the cost of implementing it will be
397
00:20:59.810 --> 00:21:02.140
more than covered by the rise in value
398
00:21:02.140 --> 00:21:04.990
of his real estate portfolio.
399
00:21:04.990 --> 00:21:07.220
Because there is Love Like Me
400
00:21:07.220 --> 00:21:08.170
Science fiction Love Like Me
401
00:21:08.170 --> 00:21:13.020
can put my implications out there
402
00:21:13.020 --> 00:21:15.060
to science fiction writers all day long to say,
403
00:21:15.060 --> 00:21:18.135 line:15%
like can you please show some kind of utopian way out
404
00:21:18.135 --> 00:21:20.900 line:15%
of the crisis that we're in,
405
00:21:20.900 --> 00:21:23.520 line:15%
and there is the extent that
406
00:21:23.520 --> 00:21:26.580 line:15%
you're showing a scenario,
407
00:21:26.580 --> 00:21:30.270
you're also subject to some restrictions
408
00:21:30.270 --> 00:21:31.560
like you've got to have a good story.
409
00:21:31.560 --> 00:21:34.850
Like you're trying to have this book work as a book,
410
00:21:34.850 --> 00:21:36.670
like by itself.
411
00:21:36.670 --> 00:21:40.840
So I guess, in a way I'm kind of going back on
412
00:21:40.840 --> 00:21:42.030
my own this a little bit,
413
00:21:42.030 --> 00:21:44.250
but it's sort of unfair to say like,
414
00:21:44.250 --> 00:21:45.930
well, maybe the science fiction writers should get
415
00:21:45.930 --> 00:21:46.780
a side of this.
416
00:21:46.780 --> 00:21:50.270
Because you're not going to write the book about like COP26,
417
00:21:50.270 --> 00:21:51.460
although some science fiction writers do.
418
00:21:51.460 --> 00:21:52.383
Yeah.
Right?
419
00:21:55.120 --> 00:22:00.047
About to say it a lot less writing about
420
00:22:01.970 --> 00:22:06.970
the deliberations of some inter-governmental politics,
421
00:22:08.030 --> 00:22:13.030
the collective and how a great report.
422
00:22:16.700 --> 00:22:17.533
Right.
423
00:22:17.533 --> 00:22:21.860
Although that would be a fun challenge to me.
424
00:22:28.140 --> 00:22:30.840
Right, and just there's a...
425
00:22:30.840 --> 00:22:31.784
Dave, from Ontario asked this,
426
00:22:31.784 --> 00:22:33.100
and it's sort of along the lines
427
00:22:33.100 --> 00:22:34.720
that we've been talking about about
428
00:22:34.720 --> 00:22:37.042
whether science fiction writers predict the future,
429
00:22:37.042 --> 00:22:42.042
or whether writing about things in science fiction
430
00:22:42.790 --> 00:22:45.050
kind of gives people some guidelines
431
00:22:45.050 --> 00:22:47.540
or rails in the ways that they can be thinking about
432
00:22:47.540 --> 00:22:48.373
whether it's science fiction,
433
00:22:48.373 --> 00:22:50.380
open spaces for new way of thinking about the future
434
00:22:50.380 --> 00:22:53.123
or whether it is in some senses limiting because
435
00:22:53.123 --> 00:22:56.293
it sets certain guide points.
436
00:22:57.310 --> 00:22:59.240
But when we talked to you,
437
00:22:59.240 --> 00:23:01.190
you said something really interesting
438
00:23:01.190 --> 00:23:03.020
to me and it stuck with me
439
00:23:03.020 --> 00:23:05.560
that you're not totally sure that fiction is supposed
440
00:23:05.560 --> 00:23:09.305
to have that role is social to do
441
00:23:09.305 --> 00:23:12.460
and insights social change.
442
00:23:12.460 --> 00:23:14.340 line:15%
And I don't know if it does either,
443
00:23:14.340 --> 00:23:17.255 line:15%
but do you think that science fiction has had
444
00:23:17.255 --> 00:23:21.850 line:15%
the role of guiding what sort of a future
445
00:23:21.850 --> 00:23:24.230 line:15%
in the United States looks for the world looks for,
446
00:23:24.230 --> 00:23:26.740
and does it still, if it ever did?
447
00:23:26.740 --> 00:23:30.170
People can point to a particular scenario
448
00:23:31.708 --> 00:23:36.708
if it's not technically unrealistic, say,
449
00:23:38.490 --> 00:23:39.373
let's do that.
450
00:23:41.930 --> 00:23:43.423
It becomes helpful.
451
00:23:45.920 --> 00:23:48.770
Trying to get a large number of engineers
452
00:23:48.770 --> 00:23:52.760
and sort of tech workers to pull together
453
00:23:52.760 --> 00:23:55.740
in a unified way and do anything
454
00:23:55.740 --> 00:23:57.330
can be surprisingly difficult.
455
00:23:57.330 --> 00:24:00.550
And a lot of energy is spent inside of corporations
456
00:24:00.550 --> 00:24:02.120
with powerpoint presentations
457
00:24:02.990 --> 00:24:04.883
and vision statement solely
458
00:24:08.080 --> 00:24:10.590 line:15%
for the purpose of making sure that all
459
00:24:10.590 --> 00:24:14.290 line:15%
of the engineers are sort of doing the same thing
460
00:24:14.290 --> 00:24:15.820 line:15%
in an efficient way.
461
00:24:15.820 --> 00:24:19.560 line:15%
And I believe that there are some cases where
462
00:24:20.500 --> 00:24:24.470
if you see the description of the final
463
00:24:24.470 --> 00:24:27.290
and result written out in a compelling way
464
00:24:27.290 --> 00:24:29.630
in a book or whatever you can just sort of hand
465
00:24:29.630 --> 00:24:32.770
that book out to people that say, okay.
466
00:24:32.770 --> 00:24:34.090
I see what we're doing
467
00:24:37.530 --> 00:24:40.420
it kind of decentralizes that the process
468
00:24:40.420 --> 00:24:42.680
of getting people to work together.
469
00:24:42.680 --> 00:24:45.600
I don't think it [indistinct]
470
00:24:48.350 --> 00:24:52.760
as with Metaverse the thing that the decides
471
00:24:52.760 --> 00:24:55.160
that they're going to be very different
472
00:24:55.160 --> 00:24:58.403
from what's actually in the book sometimes.
473
00:24:59.410 --> 00:25:03.523
So it's a pretty cloudy process,
474
00:25:04.810 --> 00:25:08.090
but what I say is that it can't work at all,
475
00:25:08.090 --> 00:25:12.925
unless it's described in the book
476
00:25:12.925 --> 00:25:16.230
is technically possible, right?
477
00:25:16.230 --> 00:25:17.830
So if I wrote,
478
00:25:17.830 --> 00:25:22.830
a science fiction driven light propulsion system
479
00:25:22.900 --> 00:25:26.363
for going to other star systems,
480
00:25:27.640 --> 00:25:31.560
that might be a fun book, but it's not going to lead
481
00:25:31.560 --> 00:25:36.543
to anyone building such a system 'cause it's impossible.
482
00:25:37.690 --> 00:25:38.690
Right.
483
00:25:38.690 --> 00:25:42.020
Well, I think that's a good place
484
00:25:42.020 --> 00:25:44.360
to start to think about wrapping up
485
00:25:44.360 --> 00:25:46.640
since we want to stick with the possibilities
486
00:25:46.640 --> 00:25:49.800
of some good social changes when never gonna do that,
487
00:25:49.800 --> 00:25:52.590
going to hyperspace ourselves.
488
00:25:52.590 --> 00:25:53.423
Yeah.
But Neal, thank you.
489
00:25:53.423 --> 00:25:54.447
Thank you for doing this.
490
00:25:54.447 --> 00:25:55.397
For sure.
I really appreciate it
491
00:25:55.397 --> 00:25:59.210
and it's great to have another book from you.
492
00:25:59.210 --> 00:26:00.043
And it was a great-
493
00:26:00.043 --> 00:26:01.384
It was my pleasure.
494
00:26:01.384 --> 00:26:05.520
All right, thanks folks, I'm Adam Rogers,
495
00:26:05.520 --> 00:26:06.700
Neal Stephenson, we've been talking to
496
00:26:06.700 --> 00:26:08.280
there's more WIRED coming.
497
00:26:08.280 --> 00:26:10.600
Thanks for being with us, we appreciate it.
498
00:26:10.600 --> 00:26:11.467
Thank you.
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00:26:11.467 --> 00:26:14.134
[upbeat music]