[ Applause ] ^M00:00:03 >> Phoebe Connelly: Good afternoon. I'm Phoebe Connelly, Deputy Director of Video at the Washington Post, which is a charter sponsor of the National Book Festival. I'd like to start by thanking the Co-Chairman of the festival, David Rubenstein, and the other generous sponsors who have made this event possible. It is my great pleasure today to introduce Charlie Jane Anders. She is the author of Choir Boy, and All The Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus, and Crawford Awards. She was a founding editor of IO9, and co-hosts the podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct, with Annalee Newitz. Her most recent novel is The City in the Middle of the Night, which NPR called "an intimate portrait of people, as much as it is a piece of culturally aware social sci-fi. Anders has also penned a few pieces for the Washington Post Opinion section, including the provocatively titled: Kamala Harris Is Wrong About Science Fiction. Please welcome--please join me in welcoming Anders to the stage. ^M00:01:05 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:11 >> Charlie Jane Anders: Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me here. This is such a wonderful event, and I feel so incredibly honored to be a part of it. And I'm so incredibly grateful that so many of you came out on a Saturday afternoon when there is so much else going on just in this building, to come see me, I'm so grateful. I really appreciate it. So, I almost flunked out of first grade [laughter], and second grade, and third grade, and also fourth grade [laughter], I was the worst student at Southeast Elementary School. I was basically--the teachers hated me. And I remember sitting there in first grade staring at a blank sheet of paper while all the other kids were doing their ABCs, and you know, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't write the letters, I couldn't do basic math. When I tried to write a letter of the alphabet, I would just end up with like this unfeasible cloud of stuff. I would end up with like a glyph that meant nothing. And this was a huge problem, and you know, I really came close to just slipping through the cracks and like, being kind of just lost in the system forever. But then the luckiest thing ever happened to me, which is that I got identified as having a severe learning disability, and I was sent to work with this brand new teacher that had just started to work at the school. She was a special education teacher named Lynn Pennington, who she was brand new, she was full of excitement and ideas, and she took me under her wing, and really worked with me, and helped me to master, like, the basic school work that I had to master in order to get through, you know, first, second, third, and fourth grade. She did everything. She got me to, you know, read and write, she got me to do basic math, yeah, she took me to the nearby university where my parents were teaching and took me to a specialist in math education, who looked at me and kind of studied me and basically identified the problem I was having with my pattern in doing math. I still can't really do math. She actually fought for me to have a calculator in fourth grade math, and that teacher wanted to kill her. Like, that teacher was super--didn't want to kill her, but that teacher was super, super mad about that. And you know, she took me to the local children's hospital and got me identified as having a sensory integration disorder. You know, so that I could understand why I basically had no coordination whatsoever, and she like taught me how to throw a frisbee and how to stand, and how to hold it, and everything. She did everything. But part of what was amazing about Miss Pennington was the way that she helped me to get past my deficiencies as an elementary school student, and to start, you know, actually learning. And that was that she appealed to my love of creativity, and you know, part of what I did when I was sitting there, trying to make letters on the page, and trying to like, do basic school work, and failing to do basic school work--I was daydreaming. I was a kid who daydreamed all the time. I just wandered around the schoolyard on my own, with like my imaginary friends, and my imaginary adventures, and yeah, my imaginary space ships, and you know, that was how I got through it. And she basically helped me to channel that into something that would let me do the school work. So, for example, when I was still trying to learn how to write letters on the page, she really worked at the classic, where she actually had her own way of working it which was, instead of making me write the letter A 100 times, she would have me write it perfectly once, and then look at it, and understand why that was different from the squiggles I'd been making, but also she had--she made a deal with me, which was, if you can learn to do this, if you can learn to write the letters, and make words appear in the proper order, and with grammar and everything, then you can write a school play, and we'll put it on, we'll perform it. And we did. And I wrote a play, and she told me, I talked to her recently about this. And she told me that as I got more excited about writing this play, and the idea of writing a piece of story that would actually be performed, my handwriting got better and better and more legible. Because I was into it, I was excited, it wasn't just something that I was having to do for school. And so we did this play called "The Bad Cad," which was about a kid who is really bad, who is, you know, a troublemaker, who goes around pranking the Principal and like leaving, you know, buckets that fall on the Principal's head, and things for him to slip on, and you know, and we got it performed, and we did--there was only one performance of The Bad Cad, and you missed it, I'm sorry [laughs], you know? And later on, you know, a couple years later, she was like, she got me to make a fake newspaper, and she drove me 45 minutes to Hartford, Connecticut, to go visit the offices of the Hartford Current, which was our local big newspaper, and I got to see the printing press, and all the stuff, and then I made a fake newspaper, and this was my reward for learning to do school work. So basically she turned my sort of daydreaming into something that could help with school work, and she turned me into a life-long storyteller. She basically gave me a love of writing, and creating, and telling stories, that I've never lost. And she pretty much made me the person I am. And I'm still friends with her. I had dinner with her a few years ago. I talk to her on the phone sometimes, and you know, I can't possibly express how grateful I am to her, for doing that, and you know? In my fiction, the figure of the kind of misfit child, this child who is kind of, you know, alienated, or lost, or kind of stuck in a world that makes sense to everybody else, but doesn't really make sense to this person, is a major thing in my fiction, and I feel like it's something that you see in All The Birds In The Sky, which was my attempt to kind of do a skewed kind of coming of age story about these two kids who are kind of struggling to be themselves in a world that is kind of trying to smush them down into fitting in with everybody else, and they don't fit in, and they don't--they're smart, but they don't understand what everybody else is talking about most of the time [laughs], and what everybody else cares about. And you know, then they grow up and you get to see how growing up as like a weird, misfit kid affects you as an adult, so not what you hoped it would be, and then my most recent novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, is very much about that kind of experience of being kind of a weird, misfit, kind of in-between person who nobody quite understands. My main character is Sophie, who is painfully shy, and incredibly like, introverted, and kind of awkward, who you know, just wants to find a place that she belongs and just wants to find friends, and she finally does find a friend named Bianca, and it doesn't entirely work out, but it's--that's also a kind of a take on the coming of age story, where part of coming of age is losing all of your illusions, and all of your kind of, you know, happy dreams about how the world works, and also just all of your, kind of the ideas that you were given as a kid, and realizing that the world is not what you thought it was. And Sophie has to journey into literal darkness. She goes into the dark side of her world, and learns to communicate with these creatures that live there in the dark, and learns to understand them. And a big theme of the book, because it takes place on a planet where there's no sunrise and no sunset, and there's permanent darkness over here, and permanent blazing sunlight over there, and you know, there's a day side and a night side to her planet. It's about kind of being caught between two extremes, but also it's about dealing with your childhood, and dealing with trauma, and dealing with your past because, she lives in a place where the passage of time is really kind of oblique, and you can't really see time passing, because the sun never goes up and never comes down. And so it's--it was a chance to think about memory and how we process things that have happened to us. And then she meets these creatures, the Gelats [phonetic spelling], who, you know, communicate through telepathic, you know, touch telepathy basically. If they touch you, you can see their memories and their experiences and so that was another way to think about communicating in a different way and also having memories that you can share with other people, when how that changes your relationship to your past. So anyway, back to like, my learning disability experience. I--you know, my learning disability didn't go away after elementary school. When I was in junior high school or middle school, I was basically dual exceptional. I was identified as being a kid who had--was both gifted and learning disabled, which was like basically you're just like weird in two very different ways, and like, you go to two different special ed programs, but like it's just--it's, you're kind of a weird kid in general, like nobody really understands you, and you know, it's kind of like the worst of both words, because you're a smart kid, but you're bad at school work. And so it's like, people can't crib your homework from you because you're sucky at your homework, but also you're really nerdy and talk about like, you know, super obscure weird nerdy shit, that nobody else understands. ^M00:10:10 Sorry, I probably shouldn't be cussing in here but anyway [laughter], and so I was in middle school, and you know, I was getting bullied a lot. There were kids who didn't understand my word vibe. I had like a frienemy, who was like, secretly kind of scheming. Actually not so secretly scheming to destroy me, all the time [laughter]. There were kids who were like--there was a lot of like, junior high school politics that I kind of like talk about a lot in All The Birds in the Sky, actually. That thing of like, you're friends this week and then next week you're deadly enemies. And then the week after that, maybe you're allies, but you're still secretly enemies, I don't know, it was like a soap opera. It was like a really terrible, terrible soap opera that just never ended. And the thing that really got me through junior high school, I didn't have anybody like Miss Pennington in junior high school. I didn't have a teacher, a special ed teacher, who was really making that strong connection with me, but what I did have was these stories that I was obsessed with, like, I wrote an essay about this a while ago. Starblazers, who here has ever heard of Starblazers? Okay, a few of you. Starblazers was this American version of this Anime from the 1970s, called Space Battleship Yamato. And basically it's about this group of people who have to save the planet earth from the evil Gamillon Empire, which is trying to destroy the earth using deadly radiation, and in order to save the earth, they have to travel across the galaxy in an old World War II battleship, that they dug up from the bottom of the ocean, and turned into a space ship. I mean, it makes total sense, right? And so they fly around in this old World War II ship, and they're having adventures, and they're constantly almost being destroyed. The ship gets like, submerged into acid, it gets blown up, it gets like smashed, there's like--and you know, they're just constantly almost being destroyed, and I would just run home from school every day, partly to escape the bullies who were waiting for me after school, but partly to go home and watch Space Battleship Yamato, and see how they get out of the latest terrible situation they were in. And you know, I was obsessed with Dr. Who, I was obsessed with Star Trek, and Star Wars, and all that stuff. You know, I was writing like really bad Dr. Who fan fiction in my little school notebooks, instead of doing my homework. Back then, I thought that the word obscene meant intruding onto the scene, which actually makes a lot of sense. It's like, if you think about the Latin roots. So um...[laughter], so my Dr. Who fan fiction back then was full of like, things like, are you surprised to see me? He said, obscenely [laughter]. People were just constantly being obscene in my Dr. Who stories, it was great. There was, like, you know--and I feel like I really just learned the power of escapism, especially in junior high. Especially with being bullied, and being a kid who was both too smart and too educationally challenged for my peers. I really learned the value of escapism and stories, and like, you notice stories about people who survive stuff, and stories about people who get through terrible situations. And I feel like that is, like, every hero of every story I've ever written, is that person who is, you know, misunderstood, but surviving, and getting through stuff. And you know, when I got through it, I grew up, more or less. I think? I don't know. And I knew I wanted to be a writer. I knew ever since Miss Pennington had me writing those plays, and ever since I was, like, writing those, like, fan fic stories in my school notebooks, I knew this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to create things like Star Blazers. Things that, things like all the stories that had saved me back in junior high school, I wanted to create stuff like that, and like, maybe help to save other people or at least help to keep people entertained during like all the weirdness and awfulness of growing up and being a person and everything. And so, you know, I set out to be a writer. It took a long, long, long time to break in. I was writing tons and tons and tons of short stories. I tried to write a short story a week for a while, and I was just writing tons of short stories, and most of them were either never published, or published in really small magazines. And it just, you know, I kept going. I didn't let anything stop me. And I just made up the weirdest, strangest stuff that I could come up with. And over time, I just started to try to think about what are these stories meaning to me, and what am I actually doing in these stories, and I got into the habit of something that I still do now, which is that I will take a blank notebook or a blank Word document and just sit there, and write down like, a bunch of questions to myself that I try to answer, like why am I doing this? What's the point of this story? Who are these people? What do they represent to me? What do these characters want in the story? And what do they, you know, and what do they, what do I want them to be doing? What do I want the story to be about? And what do they seem to be trying to do? And just try to think about what I'm doing in the story. And I know that people always say that the author can't really understand what their own story is about. But you know, I actually disagree with those people, I'm not that drunk when I'm writing fiction. I'm kind of drunk, but I'm not like that drunk. I'm like, I'm still kind of on the edge of tipsy, I feel like, when I'm writing most of my fiction. And so I do have intent, and I do have ideas, and I feel like that's a thing that really, that has helped me to kind of grow as an author over the last several years, and you know, there was a time when, there have been times when I've been writing more kind of literary fiction rather than genre fiction, like I wrote--I wrote a thing that was in Mick Sweeny's online once. I've written for a bunch of literary magazines here and there. My first novel, Choir Boy, was kind of literary fiction. But I've always come back to genre fiction. Because of that formative experience of watching Star Blazers, and dreaming about Dr. Who, and being a weird little kid with a disability, walking around the schoolyard, dreaming about my imaginary friends in their rocket ships and stuff. I always just get pulled back into that, because I feel like genre fiction is this amazingly powerful tool for, you know, thinking about the world we're in, without all of the stuff that kind of--all the stuff that is in the way of us seeing our world clearly. Like it's so--we're so close to the time we're living in right now, that it's hard to see anything around us with clarity and getting further away and telling stories about other times and other places is often the best way to really see our time, and our place with clarity and to understand what we're dealing with. And you can kind of tell thought experiments. And you can kind of explore ideas like, what if this happened? What if this happened? What if, you know, the world was very different. What if we lived on a planet where there was a permanent day side, and a permanent night side, and what would it be like to be able to walk from like, eternal darkness, to eternal blazing sunlight. Ooh, I'm big. I didn't even go very far [laughter]. And you know, stuff like that. I feel like that's a really powerful tool, and so every time I would be writing literary fiction, I would kind of get dragged back into doing genre fiction. And like, for example, I had this one short story that I was writing several years ago, that was about a couple who are in a long-distance relationship and one of them is studying to be a lawyer, and one of them is studying to be a doctor. And neither of them has time for each other. They just don't have time for their relationship. They're like, too busy trying to achieve their career goals, and get through these incredibly demanding professional programs. And they're like if only we could take like five years off and then meet each other again, and start over then. And then they're like--and I was writing it as like a literary story. I was just like, okay this is a realistic story about a relationship and this challenge that they're dealing with. But I'm like, what if one of them goes into suspended animation and they can meet up in five years, and no time has passed for that person, then the other one does that, so they can each have five years of their studies without having any distractions. Then they can meet up again and only five years have passed for each of them, and so I'm like, okay I have to write that now. And so this story I thought as a literary kind of genre story, literary kind of, you know, realistic kind of relationship story, kind of morphed into a genre story just because that was where it went in my head. And that was the most interesting way to kind of move the story forward, I thought. And you know, and I had these stories that I was writing that were kind of about queer people in San Francisco dealing with sexuality, identity and politics, and you know, the queer scene, and gentrification and displacement. And over time, they were in the present day, but over time, they just kind of drifted forward until, you know, it was the near future, then it was like the medium future, and San Francisco was being flooded, then finally I ended up with one story that takes place when most of San Francisco is underwater, and you know, in our post climate change future that we're all looking forward to, and that was just kind of something that came out of how that story was--you know, took shape, and I feel like, every time I have a chance to do stuff besides genre fiction, I really enjoy it, but genre fiction is my heart. And science fiction and fantasy are my heart, and that's because that kind of escapism, and that kind of wonder, and that kind of feeling of surviving the unimaginable, and finding a chosen family and finding people who understand you, and you know, finding where you belong, and discovering other ways to live, and other ways to exist in the world. That, you know, that really spoke to me when I was struggling with my learning disability, and when I was growing up and feeling like nobody understood me and feeling just trapped in this, you know, weird situation. And I feel like it's--it has only gotten more powerful for me. And I think for the world. ^M00:20:05 Since I started doing that. So I'm really proud to be a genre fiction--I feel like it saved me. You know, and along with Miss Pennington, my elementary school special ed teacher, it really saved me, and put me on a path. And I'm so happy to be able to share that with all of you today. And thank you so much for coming. ^M00:20:23 [ Applause ] ^M00:20:29 >> So I could read a tiny bit from The City in the Middle of the Night, or we could just go straight to questions. Which would you rather? Because I heard John Scalzi did a little reading. I don't know. Reading? Okay. I'm just going to read to you, because some of you might have heard this, because I did this same passage when I was here back in February, but it's short. But anyway, I'll just read a tiny bit from my new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night. Back in grammar school, they taught us all about crocodiles, and what to do if you ever meet one. Don't try to run, because you're on their territory, and they can ensnare you in one of their long tentacles, before you take your first stride. Plus, they can clear vast distances with their powerful hind legs, each one the size of an adult human, and they're strong forelegs can climb any surface, and dig through almost any barrier. You might be able to hide, because we don't know how they sense their prey, since they can't rely on vision or hearing in this pitch dark wind that they live in. They may use scent, or maybe they can detect motion somehow. Nobody has ever actually hidden from a crocodile, but you might be the first. The only real viable strategy though is to attack. Crocodiles do have a few weaknesses that a human can exploit. They have soft spots on their underbelly, where the carapis [phonetic spelling] doesn't extend all the way round. I know where all their major organs are, because I watched Frank the butcher carve one up for a fancy banquet after a few hunters had gotten lucky returning from the night in one piece, and with fresh game. But their main weakness, the easiest one to reach is the exact center of the pincer that is right in front of me, right now, sticking out of the creature's head. The impenetrable shell contains two knife-sharp claws, but at their midpoint, is a forest of 100 wriggling tongues, each one about the size of your little finger. If you managed to strike at the pincer's heart, and hit those slimy appendages dead-on, then you might kill it in one stroke. That pincer is so close, I can feel its edge scrape against my throat. It could slice my head off before I could even react. I try to summon all of my courage, brace my feet on the slippery ground, to deliver one great blow to the warm spot at the pincer's fulcrum. I can do this. I'm strong enough. I raise both fists. Then, I stop. Because I feel warm breath coming from beneath the pincer, where the creature's mouth is, and that part of me that always stands back and pulls everything apart, instead of just blurting out words all the time, is asking why is a crocodile's mouth so far away from all those tongues, anyway? She can't possibly be using them to taste anything or to make any sounds. Why are they right at the center of this armored scissors, vulnerable, yet shielded? I lower my fists. Instead, I push my unprotected face forward, almost losing my balance in the dark. The pincer is all around my head and neck now, but it doesn't close and kill me. Instead, this crocodile lets me press forward, and push my frost-burnt nose into the moist heat of her slimy, warm grubs. They brush against my face, and my head floods with urgent smells and disorienting sounds. A beautiful ugliness. Too much to handle, like I'm out of my head drunk with no up, no down, nothing but a whorl of sensory overload. I almost keel over, but somehow, I stay upright until I'm somewhere else. I'm way out in the middle of the night now. Surrounded by huge sheets of ice on all sides, a mountain of ice and snow sidles past, along the horizon. We're thousands of kilometers further out than any human has gone in 25 generations, since we lost all of our scout ships and our all terrain vehicles. Somehow, I can see in the night now, except, I realize I'm not seeing at all. I'm using alien senses, and my mind is turning them into sight and sound. I tear through the landscape so fast, the wind can't keep up. A sudden storm could rip me apart. The tundra could swallow me whole, but I don't even care. My back legs push against the ground and the ice surrenders, while my smaller front legs rip into the slick surface, propelling me even faster, and keeping my balance, I'm not running. This is something much, much better. I've never felt this much power in my body, and so many sensations flood into the ends of my two great tentacles as they taste the wind around me. I want to laugh, and then I turn and see that four other crocodiles are running alongside me, grasping some spiky devices in their tentacles, and guiding a sled full of some kind of precious metal. I feel a surge of pride, safety, happiness, that they're with me, and we're going home. And then we reach it, a huge structure, in the shape of a rose, with all of its petals spread, a circle surrounded by elaborate crisscrossing arch shapes. Only the very top pokes above the surface, and the rest extends far below the ice, but still, its beauty almost stops my heart. A glimmering city, many times larger than my hometown, that no human eyes have ever seen. Thank you. ^M00:26:38 [ Applause ] ^M00:26:45 >> So we got any questions? Or we can do a sing-along, or I don't know [laughter]. ^M00:26:51 ^M00:26:56 There's mics, I don't know. Hi. >> Hi, I just had a question. I've followed your work on IO9, previously, I thought was great. I was wondering, as somebody who writes not only science fiction, but about science fiction, there was a recent renaming of the [inaudible] award, and the Campbell Award, and I was wondering--and there's been some recent debate about representation within this year. Why do you pick the [inaudible] as now having these debates about representation. >> The what? >> The science fiction geneer [phonetic spelling], the, yeah, the having, the basis of representation and diversity, just, now, as opposed to having not had them in the past? >> I mean, I think I kind of reject the premise of your question a little bit. I think that science fiction and fantasy have always had these debates about representation and there have always has people who were on the outside, who were trying to become part of this genre, and this genre has always been better when it's been more inclusive. And you know, I feel like there have always been women and people of color, and LGBTQIA plus people, and disabled people, and others, writing speculative fiction and getting published a lot of the time. It's just that, you know, there has been a lot more resistance to people being included in actually the mainstream of the genre, and I think that things like the internet and social media, as with a lot of other social justice debates, these things have come to the forefront, just because there are new platforms for having these conversations, but it has always been an issue, and I feel like we have always been talking about it. Like, I've been having these conversations for as long as I can remember, and we've all been trying, pushing, and finding ways, or trying to find ways to be more inclusive in speculative fiction. And it has always been obvious that the stories are better. The genre is better, the worlds are better, the--our imaginations are better. If we include more voices and more perspectives than if we just center one voice and one perspective that is, you know, very limited. And I think that, you know, we've seen it in like the last 5 or 10 years that genre fiction is having one of the best eras it has ever had. I've heard the phrase golden age tossed around, largely because we're finally letting people in. But this conversation has been happening forever, and I feel it's way, way, way overdue that we're seeing more recognition of different voices in the genre. Thank you so much, and thanks for reading IO9. ^M00:29:27 [ Applause ] ^M00:29:29 >> Hi. >> Hi, I'm Jennifer. Thank you so much for your presentation, for your vulnerability and for sharing your story. It moved me on so many different levels. >> I'm glad, thank you. >> I want to thank you for that. So I'm a voracious reader. I'm probably never going to be a writer. So I would love if you could give us a window into a day in the life of writing one of your novels. Like, what would we see? What would we hear [laughter], what would we feel? >> Oh god. It would be so terrible. >> Could you walk us through it a little bit? Because I'd love to kind of get a sense of, you know, what it's actually like to put an idea down on paper. ^M00:30:04 >> Yeah, I mean, it's so funny because I had, like, a really good routine back when I was working on IO9, and that was like, I had to be really be disciplined, because I was working on this blog for like, you know, 8, 9, 10 or 11 hours a day, and then also writing fiction. And so I would work on the blog, and you know, get up early, work on the blog until like late afternoon, and then take a long walk to a café, and then sit in the café, and work on fiction. And the taking a long walk was a big part of clearing my head. And now that I'm kind of just, you know, kind of doing it for myself, and not actually working for anybody else most of the time, it's still kind of the same routine to a large extent. The taking a long walk is a huge part of it. I live in San Francisco, which is an amazing city to walk around in. We have Golden Gate Park, where there's like bison I can go talk to about like, problems I'm having with my story, and I do that a lot. I don't know, I do talk to myself a lot in general when I'm walking around. It's terrible. I should get a blue tooth head set, so people think I'm on the phone with someone [laughter], so yeah, I mean, I just take a lot of long walks. I will, you know, I'll kind of do urban hiking, and then I'll find a café where hopefully I don't know anybody, and just kind of sit in the corner with my headphones, and type until it's time to go get food or something. And that's kind of a lot of it. I'm trying to work on my fiction more at home as well. But I find that thing of, like, you know, the walking just helps me to get in the head space, I feel like. So that's a big part of it. And lots of coffee, and occasionally lots of beer, as well, I've got to say. But yeah, I think that's the main thing. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, cool. ^M00:31:49 [ Applause ] ^M00:31:53 >> Hi. >> Hi, thanks very much for the discussion. I recently finished The City in the Middle of the Night. >> Oh! Thank you. >> And I hadn't read a lot of your earlier work, so this was sort of my first introduction to your stories. My question was about how distant human cultural and social mores were transferred into the far distant society in a planet, and a...ecosystem, very unlike our own. One of the characters references having a bat mitzvah, and there's some other traces of old earth history and culture that have trickled down into the far future, and I was curious how you chose to present that. >> Yeah, thank you so much. I spent so much time, so in The City in the Middle of the Night, I spent so much time working on this. In The City in the Middle of the Night, it's, you know, the year 3209, I think? It's like, long, it's like the 33rd Century, and people have colonized this other planet, where like I said, there's a permanent day side, and a permanent night side, and the night side is occupied by these creatures that I just read to you a little bit about, who have the tendrils that can communicate telepathically, so I spent a lot of time thinking about what would human society be like in the 33rd Century, like 1200 years from now, basically. And I had to--to kind of get that, I had to think about like, what were we like 1200 years ago? What were we like in like the 900s, or whatever, or 800s? I don't know, anyway, 800s I guess. What were we like then? And how much would they recognize of our world, and how much would we recognize of their world? And you know, it was a lot of different things that I wanted to kind of get in there, and try to get right, because I feel like the failure mode of like...you know, humans living in the future, is that everything is just kind of sterile, and that culture has been, you know, either boiled down to just a few references, like everybody still reads Shakespeare, or whatever. Or everybody still listens to like this one piece of music, or I don't know, I feel like it can get a little bit, you know, silly. And often there is just an attempt to kind of smooth over all of the stuff that makes people really interesting, which is our different cultures, and our different, you know, expectations, and our different kind of backgrounds. And so I tried to come up with a future history, where those things still existed, and there were still religions, and there were still--in my future in The City in the Middle of the Night, we have characters who identify as Muslim, we have one Jewish character, as you mentioned, but ethnicity is completely different. And I thought that was important, you know, because by and large, the ethnic groups of like 1200 years ago are not like, nobody identifies as an angle now, nobody identifies as like a Frank. You know, there's a lot of ethnic groups from 1200 years ago that aren't really talked about any more, because they've been subsumed, or they've been changed or whatever. And so I came up with this really complicated--probably too complicated future--where earth has had some disasters. And people are just living in these 7 city-states that are protected from the outside world. And they were cities that were not famous cities today, for the most part, like Zagrab [phonetic spelling] is one of them, and like, [inaudible] in what's now India, and like Marydon [phonetic spelling], what's now Africa, and then Cartume [phonetic spelling], in West now Sudan. I hope I just got that right [laughs]. Anyway, and these were like the super powers of the 23rd, 24th centuries, and they were the ones who sent people to this other planet to live on. And so people's ethnicity is kind of based on which one of these cities your ancestors came from on earth, and nobody thinks of it in terms of like I'm from the United States, or I'm from, like, this country. They think of it as these cities. And that let me really play around with ethnicity and identity in a really different way. That's probably a really long answer, but I thought about this a lot, because I wanted--I feel like the failure mode of this sort of thing is to be like ethnicity doesn't exist anymore in the future, or ethnicity is exactly the same as it is in the 21st Century, and I feel like those are both wrong. So I thought about it a lot. Thanks for that question, I appreciate it. ^M00:36:00 [ Applause ] ^M00:36:05 >> Hi, so I don't know if you've talked about this already in your talk, I stumbled in a little bit late, but I'm in the middle of reading All the Birds in the Sky right now, and I got interested in reading it because of a Twitter thread that I was on, where we were describing that book as hopeful apocalyptic fiction [laughter] and so that's really interesting to me. So I wonder if you haven't already talked about it, if you could talk about creating ideas, and plotting ideas, that incorporate hope, particularly in genres where sometimes it's darker and edgier, and you don't get that kind of hope. >> Yeah, thank you so much for that question! I thought a lot about this. And like, I was really worried, because people were--before All the Birds in the Sky came up, people were describing it as an apocalyptic story. And that was the era of like, it was coming up after The Road, and Station 11, and a bunch of other things, where it's like the apocalypse, it's grim, it's dark [whispering], everybody is being really evil. And like, you know, everybody has stubble [laughter], I don't know, whatever. It was like, you know? And I didn't want people to think my story was like that, because my story actually is very hopeful, and very kind of--it's hopefully inspiring, and it's about people who actually are there for each other and do their best, and hopefully like save the world a little bit. And I wanted--so I kind of went around telling people it's a Buffy apocalypse. It's not like a Walking Dead apocalypse. We are stopping the end of the world, we're not just, you know, wringing our hands about the end of the world. And I still--and since then, I've really gotten more obsessed with this idea that you know, the apocalypse doesn't let us off the hook, like I feel like this idea that like, the world is like a post-apocalyptic story in which we're already, everything is over, and we're screwed, and it's too late to do anything. You know, there's something really cozy and comfy about that. It's like a warm, fuzzy pair of slippers, to think that, you know, it's too late, we can't do anything. We're screwed, it's over. You can just relax. You can be like okay fine. I can just sit here and have my like, mug of hot cocoa, and you know, my fuzzy bathrobe and not have to get out of bed because it's already too late, versus it's not too late, we can do something, we can stop this, we can fix this, if we work together. If we get past all of our, you know, our bull excrement [laughter], I see a small child [laughter], you know, we can actually do something about this. I feel like that's harder, and it requires more of us. But it's also really cool, and it's really like, inspiring, and I feel like there has been a lot of talk recently about having stories of fighting back and fixing problems, and actually rolling up your sleeves metaphorically and like, you know, doing something. And actually working together. And I feel like that's where I'd like to go. And that's what The City in the Middle of the Night is definitely that as well. It's about preventing the end of everything, and trying to solve problems, not just like wallowing. And I had this one story where it starts with the end of the world, but then there's a Genie in a Bottle, so we have like an opportunity to do something about it. I feel like that's--I like that kind of approach to the apocalypse. I don't really like the kind of like, oh and now we're doomed approach. Thank you for asking that. >> Thank you for answering it! ^M00:39:25 [ Applause ] ^M00:39:29 >> Hi. >> Hi! I had no idea who you are, yet, I was meant to be in this room because I'm a past President of The Gifted and Talented Learning Disabled Network. >> Oh wow! Oh my god! Woo hoo! Dual exceptional! >> All of those kids are traumatized, so I'm wondering if there is a short story that these non-readers could read of yours, because they might find inspiration that, you know, you can grow up and find your way? ^M00:40:01 >> I mean, I wrote an essay for Buzz Feed about Miss Pennington, and about being learning disabled, and how she turned me into a writer. If you search for Buzz Feed, and Charlie Jane Anders, and learning disability, I think you'll find it online. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to name drop, I can't help it, I'm sorry. That story I just mentioned, where the apocalypse happens, and then there is a genie in a bottle, and you know, it's like you find a genie in a bottle after the world has been destroyed. I did, last year I guess, Levar Burton, that's the name drop, had me appear live on his podcast where he reads stories, and he read the story and we talked about it. So you can go listen to that. And we actually talked about Miss Pennington, and about me being learning disabled, and how she helped me get past that. So if you want to hear Levar Burton reading a story by me, and then also hearing me talking about being learning disabled and how I got through it, with Levar Burton being super nice to me [laughs], you know, there's that. It's on his website somewhere. Hope that helps. >> Thank you. >> And thanks for all the work you do, I really--you are amazing, thank you so much. ^M00:41:12 [ Applause ] ^M00:41:15 >> Hi, just a real obvious question, when you're writing your stories, and you're constructing these plots, worlds and characters, what kinds of things do you take inspiration from to help you along this process? >> You know, I mean it can come from anywhere. Like, ideas are--like I come up with story ideas all the time, and often times, I'm like, oh yeah, that's a cool idea. And then some of them just kind of burrow into your head, which is what happened with All the Birds in the Sky. This idea of like, what if there was a witch and a mad scientist, and they were like, best friends in junior high school, and they met again as adults. And that was like, that was the thing that just kind of took hold of my brain. But I think that you know, being I read science, like, I feel like The City in the Middle of the Night, definitely came out of reading about science. Because we were discovering all of these real-life planets that were like the one in my novel. And we were learning more about these planets while I was working on the book. So, sometimes real-life science gives me inspiration. Sometimes I will, you know, just think about a trope that you know is like a trope that I'm obsessed with and I'm like, but what if this happened? Then I have to write that. Like, for example, what if there was the end of the world, and then someone found a genie in a bottle? It's--but you know? I'm the billionth person to say this, but ideas are the easy part. The hard part is what does the idea mean to you? And how are you the person to write this kind of? Because I have lots and lots of ideas that I'm like, oh! That would be really cool. If someone else wrote that, I would go read that right away [laughter]. I'm not going to write that, because I--you know? I feel like coming up with the idea was like the end of what I could do with this [laughs], you know? So I feel like the ideas can have, that kind of stick to you, that kind of get inside your head, and you just keep thinking of it, oh, but what about this? What about this? That's the stuff where you have to--and often it comes down to just, you know, things that help, you know, that are helping me to get through whatever I'm dealing with, like, especially the last few years. I've gravitated toward story ideas that just give me hope or energy or make me want to keep going, kind of. Thank you. >> Hi. >> Hi. >> I just want to say, I love your books. >> Oh, thank you, oh my gosh. Thank you. >> And I had a question about The City in the Middle of the Night. So, sometimes you read a book and they really like, lay everything out for you and other times, like The City in the Middle of the Night, I felt like the world building was a lot more like breadcrumbs here and there. So, can you talk more about kind of your thought process behind, okay what information am I going to share with the reader, and when? Make sure you kind of keep people, you know, thinking and engaged with it? >> Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, The City in the Middle of the Night, like, there's so much to that world, there's so much going on. It's humans living on another planet, there's like all the stuff about the planet, and how there is like, a permanent day side, and a permanent night side. There's two different human cities that have radically different, you know, societies, there's like these alien creatures, who we--I read a little bit of them just now, and like, it's--there's a lot going on. And I feel like, you know, the thing that actually I had to really work at in that book was like, giving the reader enough information without kind of overloading you, and like, one of the things that I kept doing in the revision process was just adding in more stuff. And I feel like, to me as a reader, I like it when I find out about the world in a dynamic way. Like, you know, my favorite example is, I think it was Tobias Buckle who has this thing about like, when I describe, I try to describe a room in the middle of a fight scene. Because people are fighting, they're knocking things over, there banging into the walls, they're like, you know, you can describe their surroundings in the process of describing them fighting in their surroundings. And that's more interesting than stopping for like, a paragraph, and being like, the walls were yellow [laughter]. There was a vase which will be knocked over in the fight scene, three pages from now, or whatever, you know? And so I try to do that. Like, in The City in the Middle of the Night, the early drafts, I was like, well, you know, it actually--the opening was much faster, and I was like, okay, you know, there is this part where Sophie is being dragged away by the police officers over this thing where she is taking the blame for her friend stealing some money. It's a whole complicated thing. And she is being dragged away by these police officers, and I'm like, this is the perfect chance to describe a lot of stuff, because it's a really intense scene. She is being dragged along and seeing all these buildings, and all these things, and all these people, and as she is seeing it, she's having emotional reactions to it, and she's in this really intense moment. So everything is going to land in a way that it wouldn't if you just described it all. And I try to find opportunities like that, but people were like, I need more, I need more. So I just--kept adding more passages where it was like she's walking around and noticing things and you know, having kind of, having a relationship with the city that she grew up in, I think. But it's tough. It's really hard. I don't, personally as a reader, like to have the story grind to a halt so that I can have a long description of stuff. I like to see it organically and I--that's what I try to do as a writer, too. But it's really hard, because, especially when it's someplace that's so different. You have to just find lots of sneaky ways to work in the information in a way that's kind of emotional rather than just like here, here's some information for you, you know? But it's tricky. It's really hard. And that was probably the hardest one ever, and I--I'm writing YA now, and I'm always in awe of like, YA authors who will do scene setting in like a sentence. They'll be like "There was a building with a courtyard, and some columns," now we're getting into the scene. And it's like, [whispers] how did you do that? [Laughter] It's amazing. Like, I'm really working at trying to do that. Anyway, thank you so much. Cool. >> So this is just in response to the person who previously asked about the article in Busby, and I just thought I'd let everybody know that it's footnote 32 in your Wikipedia entry, it's a direct link to the [inaudible]-- >> Oh! Well okay [laughter], hey thank you very much! Thank you! >> Hi! I think you're wearing a [inaudible] that has books on it? >> Yeah. >> Yay! I love it so my question is related to that, is basically what books have influenced you, what authors? And what you're reading now? >> Yay! Okay, this is the last question by the way, yeah, there are so many influences on me. One that I keep going back to over and over again is Doris Lessing, who wrote The Golden Notebook, and she wrote the Martha Quest novels, and she wrote a book that is amazing called The Good Terrorist, and I feel like I get a lot of credit for being original, because people read my stuff, and they haven't read Doris Lessing, and they don't realize how much I'm just ripping her off [laughter], Ursula Kayla Guinn, for sure, Octavia Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Nowell Hopkinson, I could go on and on, there are so many. But I feel like for me Doris Lessing is a major, major touchstone. Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming [applause begins], oh my god, thank you. ^M00:47:50 [ Appplause ]