YouSaid · the spoken record

Annalee Newitz

lines on the record: 84
first: 2020-01-27
most recent: 2020-01-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's a work. It's huge. It's a giant fish that's like 10 feet tall. No, I am not going to take my blurbs to space. Okay, well, Annalie. Annie.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's true. I feel like this is a new theme in Star Wars because in the Mandalorian, they put the blurgs on their spaceship, the fish creatures. I mean, no, why would you put a blurb on a spaceship”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very first generation of Homo sapiens that are first just developing the ecosystems on the planet, and then we go through the final section is about gentrification and how there's these cities that grow up and like how do they deal with gentrification on this completely fabricated world. And it deals a lot with like water treaties and settler colonialism and what does that mean, but it's also going to have cool hover moose things. I just decided that instead of like land speeders, they should have cyborg moose that are hovercraft that talk. Because why not?”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, for some value of us, and humans have continued evolving, we've affected our own evolution. We have lots of different morphologies and body types and cyborg crap, all the things. Any kind of EN embank's crap you can imagine, it's in there. But this is about a real estate company that is developing a planet for nostalgia, the nostalgia market for people who really want to live on an earth world. It's a West. It's not West world because it's an actual planet with real humans on it, or it will have real humans and people who want to port their brains into like a Homo sapiens body type. So the whole thing is, yeah, I guess it is like West World. They're recreating Earth, but it will be modern culture on Earth. And so they're developing the planet. And so it's a multi-generational epic, sort of like a Western, in a sense, where we start with the very”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or science fiction. So I've just started working on my next novel, which is also for Tor, my lovely publisher, and it's called The Terraformers. And it's set in a far future world as sort of a transhuman future about 50,000 years from now. We're still here.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Might be possible, yeah. It will be. I mean, I don't know. I'm not a big upload person. Like, I'm not really believer in it. I think it's much more complicated than we realize. I also think I don't know when you think about the substrates we would use for your brain, you know, imagine just getting a silent update on your brain. It just feels like you'd be, you'd literally be running on the Google Cloud or you'd be running on the Amazon cloud. And you couldn't remember certain songs unless you paid money for them. That's right. That's exactly right. It feels like, you know.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And I Individual from this time in human development. We have record Digital information. I just interviewed Jeanette Winterson about her book, Frankestein, which is about, you know, it's about temporal bodies, bodies being temporary vessels for everything else. And she's, of course, talking about downloading your brain and continuing it into the future, which is kind of a fascinating topic. It's very science fiction-y, but actually somewhat possible at some point, I suspect, you know.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Henrietta Lacks, exactly. And I think actually that's a really good analogy because, you know, it really took quite, you know, a lot of reporting to excavate who she had been, you know, and yet all these people were benefiting from her cell line. And so that could happen. There could be, you know, in 200 years there might be like a bunch of little Kara robots running around because people were like, of course, because people say Shelby is a generic individual from this time in human development. We have records of her voice. We have all this digital information about her. She must have been some sort of queen or leader.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The things that I kind of threw into my novel Autonomous is that there's a character who's a robot whose face has been, she's a humanoid robot and she looks just like a person, but her face is based on a face that they took from an old database of faces that they bought that the company that makes her type of robot was just like, I want a database full of like pretty white girl faces. And so she's just somehow they've licensed that face for her and it's like who knows whose face that was? Maybe it's someone who died a hundred years ago. So I think there will be stuff like that for real. Like that there will be just chunks of personal data that get passed around and used for Henry.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About right, like I sent a text 20 years ago. I don't even use that service anymore. Like, what happened to all my AOL texts? I don't know. And so I think, again, to go back to what I was saying earlier, each time a company or an organization has a blob of data, it's stored on a physical media, like which we tend to forget because of all this cloud talk. It's like as if it's just floating out there, you know, not like actually in a server farm somewhere. Yes, yes, it's totally safe. It's in heaven or whatever, right? So it's not, you know, in Kansas in like a giant server farm. So if that company goes under, right, that has all your data, maybe your data dies, maybe they sell it off to a company that's developing AI that wants examples of natural language in English from 20 years ago or something. Who knows, right? So we don't have a lot of control over what's going to happen.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really interesting scientific. Yeah, I mean, I think what I've learned from looking at these older cities and looking at history is that there's certain things you can expect in the digital age to happen. I mean, some of it is that we will develop digital funerary practices that will become norms. And so when people are preparing for death, they'll be thinking about like, what do I want to do with my email? What do I want to do with my cloud? What do I want to do with all this stuff that I've stored my photos and everything? And so that will just become part of your will, or it will become part of that preparation, or your loved ones will have very simple instructions that they're going to follow. So if you die without making those plans, they'll still be kind of norms in place for what to do. And we already have that, right? Like we now have ways of turning Facebook pages into memorial pages and Twitter accounts into memorial accounts. And so we are starting those norms. But then there's that other question about the data that you're not thinking.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was thinking, you know, I'm obsessed with death, as you might know. I talk about it a lot. I'm not obsessed, I'm focused on it. It's the thing. I was thinking the other day, I was like, what happens to all my emails when I die? Should I destroy them now? Should I do this? What is it? Where will it be? Or will it just be lost? Because no one can access it. What happens to my text? What happens to, you know what I mean? And before you used to be concerned that way about letters and things like that, how do people establish a timeline going forward? It's a really interesting, scientific and also studying of humanity question.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Destroyed completely, and it was just a toxic mess. You couldn't have really dug it out or done anything with it. But its culture continued, and the people who lived there continued on. And the same thing happens at Angkor. A lot of the people who leave that city continued to be Khmer. People are still Khmer and people speak Khmer today in Cambodia. And the culture has total continuity. There's no kind of collapse. It's just that we have different countries in different cities now.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mid 20th century or even in 19th century idea that civilizations collapse and then they're gone. What really happens is people migrate. A city may die, but the population of that city goes elsewhere. That's what's so interesting about Pompeii is that now there's a lot of evidence that we can use to track where the survivors of Pompeii went, which was generally just up the street. Like they would just go to other cities on the Bay of Naples. A lot of people went to Naples. In fact, And we can see that based on grave markers and family names and inheritance records and receipts, like literal receipts, people taking money that they had invested while they were in Pompeii and then kind of reinvesting it elsewhere. So we see that, yes, Pompeii, of course, was.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they're never lost, right? That's the whole point. And in fact, what you were saying about the fact that they just move or the people in them move somewhere else is really important because one of the things I learned in researching the book is that archaeologists don't talk about collapse anymore. That's a very kind of”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so, you know, to do great archaeology, you would need a time machine, but in the meantime, we have what we have. So you're right.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Yeah, no, it's one of my favorites Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly, in some cases, I think we do. We just speculate a lot about what things mean.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was kind of what I wanted to do. Remember Sleeper where he tells. Yeah, I hate to talk about what Woody Allen, but that was a great movie. Yeah, no, it's one of my favorites. They show him objects and he makes stuff up about common objects. Yeah, exactly. And that's.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was kind of what I wanted to do. And in fact, I actually, in the middle of researching four lost cities, I wrote Future of Another Timeline, partly because I was so frustrated by, you know, the archaeology, which is so, you know, the remains of these places are so incomplete. There's so much we don't know and that we'll never know, no matter how great our technology gets.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other people lived here that you don't know who they are, which is why the H.D. Wells Time Machine, when he's sitting in the time machine and he goes by and he sees everything back to Neanderthal to now, and he's sitting there as it's changing. I love that idea. It's like, so what?”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or it goes another place You know what I mean? It's so interesting. I have an ongoing argument with man about this. She's always like, oh, this is closed. I'm like, yeah, so what? Something else will open. And we have a totally different viewpoint. I like the idea.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, things are always dying. And is Detroit really dying? I visited Detroit, and there's a huge revitalization movement there. And so I want to go.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but also things like reading chemical residues and cooking pots to see what people were eating. We can look at residues in people's tooth enamel to see where they grew up versus where they died, which actually gives us tons of information about immigration patterns or migration patterns, which is really valuable when you're studying cities because cities are actually usually full of immigrants. And so it's really fun to see how far away people came to get to a lot of these cities. And I got really interested in it because I love cities and people have been asking a lot about cities that are dying. It's kind of a perennial topic for people. People love ruin porn. You hear a lot about like the idea that Detroit is dying. And I got really interested in historical precedents for that and kind of asking.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One So, what attracted this? Because, you know, what is interesting to me about a lot of this stuff is technology is helping us really see it physically see it through LIDAR, I guess, and radar and all kinds of things. I'm not an expert on this. No, Laradar.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Settlements that could be called a city. There's still debate. Is it a city or not a city? I think it's a city. Pompeii, which is an obvious one. Of course. Although it's really not obvious in a lot of ways. It turned out to have a super interesting afterlife because most people escaped. It was not a total slaughter. And Angkor, which is at the center of the Khmer Empire about a thousand years ago, it's located today in Cambodia. And you probably know it from Tomb Raider. And then my last city was Cahokia, which is located today in southern Illinois. It's right across the Mississippi from St. Louis, kind of in parts of it were actually underneath East St. Louis. And that was the biggest indigenous city in North America about a thousand years ago also. And really the biggest city in North America until Europeans came. It was enormous and it's full of these huge earthen pyramids.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. It's super fascinating. And so it was actually hard for me to narrow down the four cities I wanted to. What did you pick? So I picked Chitalhoyuk, which is a Neolithic city in central Turkey. It's in Cappadocia region. And that was a 9,000-year-old city. It's one of the earliest...”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I am personally really interested right now in history and in archaeology and paleontology, evolutionary biology, all of these fields that put together can kind of give us a picture of where the planet's been, where humanity has been. And I just finished an extremely long project. It took me about five years and it's finally going to be a book coming out next year, Abandoned Cities. The book is called Four Lost Cities. I love that.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Each time we want to preserve that history, someone or a group of people has to go in and say, all right, we're going to preserve this chunk of the internet with our Wayback machine, right? We're going to have to pick and choose which things we copy over into the next set of massive servers, whatever storage we're using. And each time that it's copied over, just like those ancient monks 2,000 years ago, 1500 years ago, they're going to miss things or they're just going to choose not to copy some things. And don't even get me started on how Sappho's poetry got lost.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only one's history as written is generally just one piece of a much bigger picture. And I think that there's a lot of, I would say kind of misguided utopian thinking in tech that because we have the storage capacity to hold potentially every point of view on every historical event that therefore we are doing it. And I always point out to people, you know, we've thought that at many points in history, like we thought, oh, we've got all these books and somehow magically they won't burn or we've got all this footage on film, but somehow it won't erode over time. I mean, the storage media that we're using for our history, our digital history now, is not going to last forever. It's going to last, if we're lucky, you know, what's the lifetime of a hard drive?”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very self selected, but also people who don't fit in get driven out. There's a lot of reports of people who, you know, women especially getting driven out of kind of the Wikipedia elite and women's entries on Wikipedia being deleted, even if they eventually go on to win Nobel Prizes, for example. And so we know just from watching in real time how history is really”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there is, yeah, I am, but also there's a minority report, like a real life type. You know, the term comes from a real thing, evidence provided by kind of the party that isn't in power or the losing party. And on Wikipedia, you can usually see that in the revision history and the notes. You can see people having these debates. And often find facts that have been suppressed. And the way that, and that's exactly how history is written. Ultimately, over time, a lot of those notes and a lot of those traces of the minority views of history will be erased and will be left only with what, you know, as always.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the novel, I talk a lot about the idea of edit wars, and I was very careful to use those words because I was thinking a lot about Wikipedia and how history is preserved on Wikipedia and how it is a kind of collective process, but it's also, as many people have reported and as people have shown through research, it's a very violent process. It's a process of conflict in which certain people tend to win out over others. So there's very much a kind of minority report of history that you can read usually in like”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“White dude said about her exactly, right? Exactly. So we have that, and then we have, you know, I was just, I was, when I was in Israel, I went out to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there's that, and they can hardly read it. And who knows what was going with this crazy group that was out there in the desert. But now we have all this. We have so much of a history of everybody, of the whole world. And yet it has enormous implications of manipulation. So can you talk a little bit about how you look at where are we with the idea of what history is?”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the other one is what is the connection? In that big time, is this idea of revisionist history? And the part that technology plays in it, what is our history? That nothing, you know, there's the famous line from the book on this Facebook movie, you know, the internet's written in ink, and nothing can, everything is there. The proof is there. And at the same time, it can be so badly manipulated that isn't the truth. So it creates sort of two things. You finally do, like, we don't really know what happened with Cleopatra. We don't know everything because there's no record of it. There's some records.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're just murdering. They're just living in time. But slowly. Beth starts to realize that she's getting visits from a time traveler and who turns out to be Tess. This isn't really a spoiler. And so she and Tess have to kind of figure out, she has to kind of figure out why Tess is visiting her and Tess is sort of Gradually figuring out why she's drawn to keep trying to help Beth. And their lives are sort of entangled. And so there's the central mystery of the book, which is one of the mysteries is, can you change history? And then the other one is what is the connection?”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tough riot girls, they accidentally start murdering rapists. I mean, it really does start by accident, but then they kind of were like, that was kind of cool. Maybe we should go out and try to like find some rapists to kill. And so it becomes this really twisted story about sort of female friendship in high school and what does it mean to rebel and what does it mean to try to change the system. And so really we have two characters. One, Tess, who is trying to change things by organizing and going back in time and doing things in a very peaceful way as much as possible. And then Beth, whose friends are using violence to try to change the system.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, she does, but that's early in her life. But she doesn't, for example, the government doesn't deny her, you know, payment for serving in war. And she becomes a senator. She becomes very powerful, as she should have. And so some justice is done. And it's a big inspiration. And then the other part of the book is focused on a high school girl named Beth, who is stuck in time. She's a riot girl. She's living in the early 1990s. She's in a very conservative area where she doesn't really fit in. Her family is really abusive. And she's not a time traveler. She's just a regular kid who has to wait to escape her home by going to college. And so it's just about her life. And what happens is because she's living in this extreme situation and she and her friends are these.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they go back to try to So, Tess is going back to mostly the 19th century to try to change abortion rights, and she's working with a group called the Daughters of Harriet, who are her academic cohorts. And Harriet is Harriet Tubman, who has become a senator in the 19th century because it's in this alternate history not only as abortion illegal, but women got the right to vote earlier. They got the right to vote the same time that freed slaves did. And so they elected Harriet Tubman as a senator during Reconstruction. So she's a big hero to all the feminist characters and a big hero to me, so that was fun. And so the other part of the book.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changing everything. You know, like one guy winds up getting a daughter that he never had before. Sorry, spoilers. And then that doesn't all the only difference that makes is that he's a little bit happier, but it doesn't mean that, you know, we get a fascist president or like there's some black hole”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. So the butterfly effect finally took effect. But then there's the idea that you can't change it at all, where you try to change it and there's some kind of something holding you back. And then there's the idea that you can, but it won't make a huge difference. And I'm really a big fan. That's where you want it. That's where I wanted to be. And as I say, I'm a big fan of that. And there's a show on right now, Legends of Tomorrow, that basically deals with that. And these are characters who are going through time and they're trying to prevent major changes, but they make little changes all the time and they don't end up.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's the sort of Peggy Sue got married kind of vision. There's several different versions of how time travel works, right? Like there's the one like the Ray Bradbury story, Sound of Thunder, where changing one tiny thing can means. Huge changes, right? Yeah. It's literally called the butterfly effect because you step on a butterfly, you come back to the present, and there's a fascist who's become president of the US.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I see it. Okay. Okay, that's your concept. Then there's the concept in the one that James, what's his name was just in. It was a TV show about stopping the assassination of John F. Kennedy. whatever the day John Kennedy was killed. Yeah, I haven't seen that one, but that's a super.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Or you kill someone when they're a baby, or you make a new person happen because they parents meet. And so we find out. Driven by social movements. Okay, okay.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if they get caught doing it. Okay. That means that they won't get any more grants and they're. Or Mittler, some other So you're saying it's difficult to change history even with a time machine. Now, you know, you have books like Time and Again, where you just don't let people meet. And so the thing doesn't happen, and which you can think like that, right? Yeah.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go back in time, and they're saying, okay, well, we're going to change history so that abortion is legal. That means they have to go back to the 19th century or even earlier and organize with women and other people who are interested in reproductive rights. And it takes years. Like people go back in time and spend 20 years trying to change things, and it still might not work. So it's just like building a movement at any time. So there's a lot of limitations to how much they can change, which was to me as a writer really fun and kind of meaty because that's where the questions all come up. Like if you want to change history, how do you do it?”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. But if they get caught doing it, or if they state that they're going to do it, if they say that's my agenda is I want to change history, that means that they won't get any more grants and they're denied tenure and things like that. So there's institutional barriers, there's taboos against it. But also it's really hard to change history. And it's just as hard as changing the present. And so when people go back in time, they can't just kill Hitler. And in fact, one of the characters says, if you kill Hitler, you just get Bitler or Zitler or Mittler. Some other person comes in and takes that person's place because Hitler is not just a special guy. He represents a huge social movement. So what you have to do if you want to say prevent genocide during World War II is create a social movement that's as powerful or more powerful than, say, the rise of Nazism to combat that. And so when my character”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So ridiculous when you say you're not supposed to. So there's two ways. So because of the way time travel works in fiction, you have to come up with a lot of limitations, right? Like you can't, as a writer, I think it would be incredibly boring to have it be possible to just go back and shoot Hitler and have everything changed. So there's two limitations on changing history in this book. One is that there's all these taboos and laws against it. You're not supposed to. And these characters, if they're academic institution finds out that they're doing that and not just observing history, they'll be fired. I mean, that would be, you know.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My characters are in the middle of these are people who study history they find out that they're in an edit war over history with another group of people who they're not sure who they are. But my main character, Tess, is interested in trying to create a world where women do have access to abortion in the United States. She lives in a timeline where they don't. But every time she goes back and does things to try to make it possible for change, that edit gets reverted. And so she realizes there's this other force out there. So she and her colleagues who are a group of academics at UCLA are trying to figure out who this is and gradually figure out.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, but I think there's this kind of myth that there's some untarnished, untouched history that you could somehow get to. Perhaps if you had a time machine, the problem is that because there's all these people who are traveling back in time, not everyone can. You have to go through four years of a very rigorous process. So it's really, it's kind of like going to grad school. The only people who really travel through time are people who are researchers that have four years to blow on this training or like spies. Or also it turns out insurance agents, which is a whole other thing.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll get into that paradox Anyway, So, you can only go back in time, and that was partly because I wanted the book to be dealing with these questions around revisionist history that were so focused on as a culture right now and sort of saturated our ideas.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT