![]() ![]() And so my train character, who is part of the public transit network on the planet, is, in fact, a huge video game nerd as well as being a very good train, who helps bring people from the northern to the southern part of the continent. They’re like, oh, yeah, I’ve thought about being a sentient train.ĪNNALEE NEWITZ: He had been thinking about this for a while, I believe. The question I needed really answered was, if you were a sentient train, what kinds of things would you do for fun? And Jeffrey was like, oh, obviously, strategy gaming. And my main question for him after I said, what are all the politics around setting up a train system? How do two cities agree to let a train travel between them? Which is actually quite complicated. I also talked to the head of the Department of Transit here in San Francisco about trains, and his name is Jeffrey Tumlin. She’s a planetary scientist.Īnd I also talked a lot to a scientist who studies the origin of plate tectonics, and she actually helped me come up with a very ridiculous far-future device that would actually affect the plate tectonics of an entire planet. I talked to Vickie Hanson, who studies the lack of plate tectonics on Venus, which is really interesting. And so I talked to David Catling, who studies the development of atmospheres. I think, because of my training as a science journalist, I can’t imagine writing something without first consulting the experts. Who did you talk to about building a whole planet from scratch?ĪNNALEE NEWITZ: I started by talking to a lot of scientists. We get into plate tectonics, which I love, fan favorite, conservation, urban planning. but I feel like I learned a lot of just very basic science from it. And so, of course, in fiction, I get to do that, and so I have this ability to have this multigenerational story of a planet undergoing transformation.īut honestly, the other reason I wrote it was I really wanted to answer some granular questions about what it takes to build a geological formation and what would it be like if you could build a city from scratch so that it functioned in a bargain with the environment instead of just crushing the environment entirely. One is just, like a lot of science journalists, when you’re covering environmental change, you wish that you could live for thousands of years just to see how everything is going to turn out. MADDIE SOFIA: All right, so what inspired you to write this book about building worlds in the first place?ĪNNALEE NEWITZ: There’s a couple of things. Annalee, welcome back to Science Friday.ĪNNALEE NEWITZ: Thanks so much for having me. ![]() Annalee Newitz is a science fiction writer and science journalist based in San Francisco and the author of The Terraformers, which comes out January 31. This novel explores conservation and colonialism and how it all happens in lockstep with capitalism and corporate greed. Their job is to protect wildlife, help rivers flourish, balance carbon levels, but everything changes when they find Spider City, an ancient society secretly living inside of a volcano that changes what the terraformers think they’re doing. It starts off with Destry, and her partner, a flying moose named Whistle. It’s being terraformed, turned into an Earth-like planet, for an intergalactic real estate company that has, surprise, surprise, not the purest intentions. For the rest of the hour, we’re traveling deep into the future– think thousands and thousands of years– to a planet called Sask-E. ![]()
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