StarTalk Podcast_ Creating Science Fiction

This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist. And today we are talking about sci-fi in literature and in movies. I got with me my co-host, Chuck Nice. Chuck. Hey, Neil. So, Chuck, we have between us Jason Ellis, who's an assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology. City Tech, we call it. Wow.

And you teach a course on science fiction. That's right. They didn't do that when I was in school. There were no courses on science fiction. We were learning all this, all these folks, they were all dead and talking about a time in a way it would... with no way understood. Yeah, they were like, no, it's about real science. You have to, you don't even know real science. You have to know that before you can, do you have to know real science before you write science fiction? We're getting there, Chuck.

We had a whole show, Chuck. We let it happen organically, Chuck.

Okay.

So we're talking about this relationship and we're featuring my interview with Gail Ann Hurd. Gail Ann Hurd, I'm a credit watcher at the end of shows. I don't know if you are. It's hard on TV. You're one of those people. On TV it's hard because they roll the credit. In the movies. I'm the last one out and they're asking me, get the hell out. Let me tell you something.

People who make films love you. because that is the ultimate sign of respect. Is to sit and read the credits at the end of a film. Right on down to who supplied the food, the food truck. Exactly, yeah, craft services by Reggie.

Reggie and son. So you teach a course on science fiction, and as I understand this, you curate their science fiction library. That's right.

We got a donation of over 600 linear feet of materials, including 4,000 magazines.

You're measuring books by feet. Right.

If you think of like a standard shelf is three feet wide, I mean 600 feet long, that's a lot of books.

That's a lot of books, dude. And so you got that, so you're the man for that stash.

I help coordinate it with the library, but it's a really tremendous resource that we have now.

And a lot of science fiction first appears in magazines, if I remember correctly. Is that correct? That's right.

More so in the past than today, but certainly there's a very vibrant publishing industry in science fiction magazines now, like Astounding Science Fiction's having their 90th anniversary this year.

Astounding Science Fiction's 90th anniversary. Wow. Wow. So Gayle Ann Hurd is a producer, and I think her first day on the block was The Terminator. Good movie to start out on. Start your career. Right. What a baptism that is. Did the whole trilogy. She's got Armageddon under her belt. Okay. But don't get me started. That movie violates more laws of physics per minute than any other movie that has ever been made. Just FYI. Love it. She did Dante's Peak.

So these are films that are different branches of science. Dante's Peak, of course, is a volcano. Also did, of course, The Walking Dead for television. Wow. So science fiction, science fantasy. And so when did you first get into science fiction? You're an academic professional at it, so.

Right, I guess I've had a lot of.

A lot of academics, it's something from childhood.

It is, and it's for me too. My first strong memory I remember is when I was three years old, watching a.

Three?

Three years old.

Nice.

I'm in front of.

Back when I was three.

It's probably the only thing I remember from back then, but it was burned on my brain. Seeing the Millennium Falcon deftly maneuvering between the asteroids in a trailer for The Empire Strikes Back when it first came out.

Right.

And it was playing in the drive-in and my folks saying, no, we're not going to drive in to see that. And so it was this tension of the desire to see this fantastic spectacle on the screen and being told I couldn't.

So then on, so you got imprinted.

Yes, and it's something that stuck with me throughout the years.

Did you ever get to see Star Wars?

I did get to see Star Wars. I've seen it hundreds, thousands of times probably.

Which medium were you most enchanted by, the film, TV, or?

It was primarily film originally. And then television became a part of it later on. And I didn't get into reading science fiction until I was a teenager. Until you learned how to read.

I had to learn how to read first.

It happened a little after three. Just a few months. Right.

But it was strange for me to get into reading science fiction because I originally really enjoyed reading science popularizations like Einstein's Relativity, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Mirror Matter, other books like that, Carl Sagan, his works. And it was one of my friends, Marty Magdon, Boy Scouts.

So popular non-fiction science, what you're talking about.

Who worked at local Barnes & Noble. I was having him order me new books once the library was out of stuff that I could read. And he said, you know, Jason, you ought to try out science fiction. And so he introduced me to Asimov and Bradbury and Clark and got me into reading it.

That's the trinity.

Yeah, yeah. Three of the early grandmasters, yeah.

Okay, very early, dude. So of course I had to know how Gayle Ann Hurd got interested in this. And so, let's check it out. So I'm looking at this filmography and it has very strong overlap with the geekosphere.

I am.

I'm a geek, I'm a nerd. Before there were words to describe it.

Were you a girl nerd?

Oh my God, yes. Are you kidding?

Oh my gosh. So how early did this manifest?

I started reading comic books when I was six.

Okay.

And, I mean, this is how geeky I am, all right?

But I don't think girls did back then. No, no, no. Because I looked at the ads and the back was all for guys.

No.

All the ads were for.

No, but I loved them all and I would admit I was a Marvel girl.

Okay. Okay.

Guilty as charged. And then I graduated into science fiction novels. Both YA, which.

Young adult, yeah.

YA didn't exist back then.

It wasn't its own category, really.

It was still children's.

Children's books.

And I became so obsessed with it that I actually advised the local library, this is Palm Springs, California, and suggested what books they should acquire in science fiction fantasy.

You were out ahead of the librarians.

And then I started writing book reviews predominantly about science fiction fantasy.

You know, people who read a lot disappoint me if they do not take that wisdom that they've acquired and somehow share it with others. because you're keeping it all locked up into yourself. And the fact that you're writing reviews, you've satisfied my... Thank you. Thank you. You're okay by me on this. You've obtained some kind of insight into the human condition, into storytelling, and then other people get to know about it.

I mean, I was a passion. I was not only passionate, but I was proselytizing for the genre.

So Jason, other than sheer entertainment, Is there some other value you can ascribe to reading science fiction? And I ask that because if you read novels, people can be entertained by novels, but at the end of the day, you also gain a little extra insight into the human condition and human emotion and love and hate and war and peace. So there's an extra, and maybe if it's embedded in a history, you learn a little bit about the history of the world. So in sci-fi, what else do you get out of it?

I guess one of the things that I like about science fiction is that it combines the STEM fields with the humanities.

Science, technology, engineering, math. Right, exactly.

And so instead of just having a story about science and technology, it looks at how science and technology affects individuals and society. And it's through those means that we get to ethical questions, philosophical questions.

Very good. Absolutely, yeah.

I think that's one of the things that drew me to science fiction as a kid was at the my first encounter, I would say, wasn't reading, it was Star Trek. And what I really liked was not the spaceship, and not the fact that there were aliens, but the fact that all of mankind worked together. And I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, that all these different people were on this ship, and they never, ever talked about their differences.

Not once.

They never ever acknowledged that anybody would, and then they would meet these, creepy, crazy looking aliens and they would never say like, what's up with your face?

You know, they would just say like. You're some ugly aliens. That never happened. Right. Because they were objectively ugly. They made, yeah. They made them objectively ugly. It's so funny. But it never became a topic.

And it never, but it was never anything that, like no one's appearance ever became an issue.

So Jason, let me ask then. Is science, hold aside the reader, is science fiction a way for the writer to offer social commentary? Oh, certainly.

And I think that Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek is an excellent example of this, where not only are you showing how people work together, you have equality amongst the sexes inside the crew. And also you can think about how the first kiss between a white person and an African American on television was in Star Trek. And it was largely not just on television, part of Gene Roddenberry wanting that moment to happen, but also the part of William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols, you're wanting it to happen because they would flub the takes when they were told not to actually kiss for the cameras because the producers in the studio was like, we don't want to see that on TV. But Shatner and Nichols, they kept messing up

those takes, but always nailed the ones where they were actually kissing because they knew how important that was for people to see that on television.

And of course, Bill Shatner really liked kissing Lieutenant Uhura.

Well, so the weird thing is, of course, when they did kiss, they got mail from some southern states objecting to this on television. But I don't think they ever got mail when Shatner was kissing green aliens. Green aliens, not even human. That's okay. I can't believe you're kissing an alien. So there's social commentary. But not all authors think about that kind of effect, I presume. Is that correct?

I would say so, but even if someone isn't intentionally providing some social commentary, science fiction is extrapolating from the here and now. whether it's something that's in the far future or an alien world or even extrapolating to the past, like with steampunk. It's everything based around the authors or the directors, filmmakers, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, et cetera.

So science fiction is a conduit to the future. And it's not only movies, of course, but comic books and other media. And so I asked Gail Ann Hurd about whether any of this background that she enjoyed with science fiction influenced her choice of movie that she elected to produce. Let's check it out. At the risk of stating the obvious, your geek roots in comics, comic book stories, science fiction, they manifest in this filmography.

Yes.

Strongly. So what are you, what the hell, how are you doing?

You know what?

What is going on here?

I make what I'd like to see. And my newest show is Falling Water for USA Network. Which is.

Oh, I have yet to see that, but everybody's telling me to see it. It is. Everybody.

Fantastic.

Everybody.

So why weren't you listening to them?

Okay. Tonight, I'll dig up some episode. Okay, thank you. Tonight.

Thank you.

You should. Okay, because I felt bad. I got to know what the pulse is out there.

It's because it is... I mean, if you liked Inception, that was a great amuse-bouche for Falling Water.

Because Inception, these are the nested dreams of reality.

And we're following in, following water, we're following three different characters who are all seeking something, something that's missing from their lives.

There's a shared dream among them or something?

It turns out that one of the conceits of the show is that we're all dreaming separate tiles of a large mosaic. And certain powerful dreamers can leave their dream and enter yours, or mine, or anyone's, and just think of the power that that will have. And how valuable they will become to people who want more control than they already have over the world.

So Jason, can you assess the causes and effects of the chicken-egg technology shown or imagined in science fiction Does it become real? Is something that we do in science that then gets adopted, but they take it another step? What is that relationship?

I think it's a very complex relationship, one where both feed into each other. It's like a feedback loop that works in both directions. So as science and technology create new innovations, those things get incorporated into the science fiction that we enjoy and the comic books that we enjoy. But at the same time, people come up with new ideas, try to stretch the boundaries of possibility, such as... Jerry Pornel, and I forget the other author's name, wrote a book in the 1970s, The Moat in God's Eye.

The Moat.

The Moat in God's Eye, in which they imagined personal computers, pocket computers that you would carry around. And 30, 40 years later, then we had that reality.

Right.

You know, it's funny because Jeff Bezos just did an interview.

The head of Amazon.

The head of Amazon did an interview where he talked about Alexa being inspired by the way people talk to computers in the sci-fi movies and TV shows that he saw when he was a kid.

And I thought about it. I was like, that's so funny.

Like, in all sci-fi, people talk to the computer, they go, computer, working, you know, it's like, it's so, and now we do that.

And it's almost always a female voice. And it's almost.

Always a female voice, you know, but even 2001 Space Flight, he's talking to the computer.

Oh, how?

How?

You know, I'm sorry, Dave. Like, you know, I can't do that, right? So it's weird that we now.

Actually do that.

And we take it for granted that we say, you know, okay, Google, or hey, Alexa, or Siri, and we take it for granted.

It's so weird.

But I would say that it's not just that one-way street of science fiction imagining this new possibility and it comes reality, but also that the things that are discovered, the new things that are found in science and technological innovation, also feed their way back into science fiction. Because the thing is, with really the way the iPad works, or really the way that Alexa works, the way that we understand it now, wasn't envisioned in science fiction. We can trace it back and see where there might be a little bit of inspiration, but it wasn't the thing itself.

Okay. So this is the complex elements. It's more a tapestry of information coming together. That's right. As opposed to a linear track that you can establish. Right.

There's a really good example of this, if I can share it, with H.G.

Wells.

In 1909, he wrote The Land Ironclads, a story about the first modern battle tank. And it was some years later, in 1911 or so, that Major General Swinton invented the tank for the British military, or it led into the advent of World War I. Later, Wells sued Swinton. claiming ownership of that invention of the tank. And then Swinton showed up at his house with a tank.

With an actual tank. You got a tank. You just wrote about it. I made the tank. Who's suing who now?

Luckily, it didn't have to go that far, but Wells did lose that court case. And I think rightly so, because even though he was able to show that Swinton had read the Strand magazine that the story appeared in, science fiction is something that I think can inspire, give people ideas. It can provide motivation for new research, but it isn't necessarily like the actual patent application.

Right. We're going to take a break. When we come back, more of my interview with Gail Ann Hurd, the producer of really cool sci-fi movies and TV shows. We're back. Star Talk. This episode, all about science fiction as it's represented in film, in books, in comics, in television. Featuring my interview with Gail Ann Hurd, who's a prodigious producer of just this kind of product.

Say that five times fast. Prodigious producer of this kind of product.

Let's pick up where I just asked her about how much does she think about the accuracy of science in sci-fi films. Let's check it out. I'm looking at the Terminator, aliens, alien nation, the abyss. That was all underwater there. And this just goes on and on and on. Armageddon. I got to tell you my relationship with Armageddon. So let me say of Armageddon that I found the movie thoroughly entertaining.

Just the writing, the timing, that mixture of actors, the wit, the emotion. It was just fun. That's my first of all comments. That being said, in my community, Armageddon is one of the films we reference in science class for how many laws of physics are violated.

Well, what's really funny is the last thing I was hearing about was if an asteroid was coming, that people have decided that some of the science in Armageddon, which we know was faux science, was actually like not the worst. We were not the worst. I probably have another one in there. And by the way, we could spend an entire hour on Dante's Peak. I mean, the volcanologists, because this is the thing. So we were like, we're going to, we have a Cascades volcano. They don't have lava. It's pyroclastic flows, et cetera.

Um, and, uh, and pyroclastic flows.

So, um, So the studio, which we'll go and mention, said, no, no, volcanoes have lava. It's like, there are different kinds of volcanoes.

They didn't care.

We had a volcanologist named Jack Lockwood, who was fantastic. And I kept saying, I kept sending him scripts saying, I'm sorry, I can't get this changed. So we tried to get other things right in terms of the earthquakes and the pyroclastic flow that we did have.

Let's bring in a geologist. I've got Janine Krippner on Skype. Janine, welcome to StarTalk.

Thank you very much.

So you're a volcanologist. So this is... you know, Spock. Live long and prosper, Janine. You're a volcanologist with the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program. That's actually a thing. And also a science communicator and blogger. for in the company of volcanoes. You haven't melted yet or anything. You just, you're one of these people who walks up to volcanoes and studies them. Yes, I am.

But I study the pyroclastic flow side of things.

So you're exactly, your expertise is where Dante's Peak got it exactly wrong.

No, they got it, well, the pyroclastic flow was great.

Oh, okay.

I love that scene.

So now just- Wait, wait, wait. So they were able to include pyroclastic flow with lava, but the lava part was false.

The lava part's completely wrong.

For that particular volcano? Yes. So briefly, tell us about pyroclastic flow.

So pyroclastic flow is basically- Yeah, yeah, Chuck knows it.

Chuck knows it, but for the rest of us.

I'm going to go get some coffee now, Janine, because, you know, pyroclastic flow, I mean, that's where I'm a Viking.

What do you think it is?

She's calling you out. Yeah, exactly. Chuck just left for coffee. So tell us about it.

It's this really fast, really hot cloud of hot gas and hot volcanic rock. So it's basically a racing cloud of death that goes down a volcano and can destroy everything in its path.

So they showed that very, very well in the movie.

In fact, that was the scene where I watched it as a 13-year-old girl going, that's what I'm going to study for the rest of my life.

Wow. Talk about inspiration. That is cool. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Just to clarify, listen to what she just said. She said, I saw this rolling cloud of hot death, and I want to study that for the rest of my life.

That's what 13-year-old girls do, right?

Exactly. Very cool, so how would you generally rate the science in Dante's Peak? Is it one of the best volcano movies? Because the Pompeii has been done five or six times since movies could be made. Where would you rank that? Dante's Peak?

I would rank it at the top by a very big margin.

Oh, okay. High praise from Caesar. So in Dante's Peak, what would you say they did best? And what would you say they did worst?

The best, I mean, I'm a bit biased, but the pyroclastic flow was fantastic. The ash plume was great. The ash spreading out over the town was fantastic. The uncertainty around the eruption as it's leading towards eruption is pretty good. The monitoring that they're using, the different tools like seismicity, measuring the gas is fantastic. Um, not so great was the volcanic ash.

I have a major beef with the volcanic ash.

Um, and of course the lava flow, that's the volcanic elephant in the room. And they did the Laha really great too. That mud flow that wiped out the bridge and killed our fearless leader, unfortunately. And with the outrunning of the pyroclastic flow, so they make it into the mine shaft, it looks like everything's okay. Really, that really hot, scorching gas cloud probably would have got them a bit there in the end.

So what was the problem with the ash? You said, I had a real problem with the volcanic ash.

Why?

They have used wet newspaper, so it looks fluffy and really soft. But in reality, volcanic ash is pulverized rock, crystals.

And glass.

So it's really nasty stuff. It can collapse roofs. It can cause breathing issues. You do not want it in your eyes.

It's horrible.

So ash is just the wrong word. It's the wrong word. It's not ash. It's not ash. It's volcanic glass. Volcanic pins and needles. Yeah, exactly.

Volcanic shards shards that's what it is it's volcanic.

Shards volcanic doomy bits.

Yeah so how about the banter among the science folk in the movie because that takes research to get that right how do they do their.

I think they did pretty good, especially the coffee addiction. That's a really important part of being a scientist, probably in many fields. The gung-ho nature of Dr. Harry Dalton is a bit too much. We would always want more data. We wouldn't want to go straight and scare the crap out of the townspeople. That's not what we do.

Until you have enough data to do so. Right.

Exactly, exactly.

But don't try to play like you don't want to scare the crap out of the townspeople.

Don't play like you don't want to scare the crap out of the townspeople because you know that's one of the parts of your job you enjoy most.

I haven't got to do it yet, so I'm not sure.

I have to come back to you on that one. So just to repeat, you are certifying Dante's Peak with all of its shortcomings as being the finest scientific, the most representatively accurate volcano movie ever made head and shoulders above all others. Including Joe in the volcano. Joe in the volcano?

As a doctor in volcanology, yes. Yes, I do.

Cool. And could the fact that New Zealand has had some unfortunate encounters with earthquakes in recent decades, Christchurch being almost completely destroyed, has that had an influence on your curiosity about the raging earth?

I was actually on my way long before that. I look a lot younger than I really am.

Okay.

If you say so yourself.

But, no, living in New Zealand, I grew up around volcanoes. So I always loved volcanoes since I was, gosh, since before I could remember. So, yeah, the landscape I grew up in has definitely made an impact.

Can I ask a question just unrelated to sci-fi? This is actually very, very real. There are some people who advocate for the denial of climate chaos being caused by humans that say that volcanoes are kind of the culprit here, that they dump more CO2. CO2 into the atmosphere than anything else could ever do so. And that we're wasting our time trying to mitigate human activity with respect to producing carbon.

What do you say to those people?

I can see why people think that.

In fact, people don't even realize just how much activity there is when they think that. But in reality, volcanoes on land and underwater produce less than 1% of carbon dioxide than people do. So it's So true on any, on any, yeah, it's just not.

So, so let me bring this to a close and ask you, is there some volcano movie that you can imagine wanting to consult on that takes it in another direction or it's uncharted territory for the science fiction media?

Ah, goodness. That's a good question.

We've done the super volcano thing that's been overkilled.

Um, how about underwater volcanoes or, or ice volcanoes as we have on some of the moons of Jupiter?

That'd be a neat one to do.

Would we be in space or has this, well, astronauts.

On a planet that has ice volcanoes. How about that? Actually, I will see that movie. That's a good movie, dude. Because we think of volcanoes as a place where hot things come out of, but it's only a place where there's high pressure. And you can have high pressure on a place that's very cold where something boils at 100 degrees below zero. And so now everything is icy to us, but you have high pressure volcanic circumstances on these other places. Okay, so if we get that to happen, we'll make sure you're on the list for their consult. Consultants, yeah.

I would absolutely consult. There need to be more scientists consulted on movies, as I'm sure you all agree.

Well, excellent. So thanks for coming on, bringing your expertise to us.

My pleasure.

Excellent. Okay, thank you. That was very cool. She was very cool. Yes, yes. I like the idea of the ice volcanoes too. That's right.

But Jason, do you have any volcanic sci-fi.

Literature that you did? Not in literature. 1967? Yeah. Can you dig it? That's right, man. I'm a mad cat. I dig it. I'm digging it, babe.

I say the same thing to my students. They probably don't know what.

I'm talking about.

I don't know why I just turned into Sammy Davis Jr. No, no, you didn't turn into Sammy Davis. You turned into Austin Powers there. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. So what volcanoes do you dig?

Well, I can't think of any in literature that I've read about, but I am thinking in terms of the movie that you just pitched to the volcanologists that we spoke with, Europa Report. It seemed like part of the story centers on like how unstable the surfaces where they land on Europa, which those you could either see or maybe turn in different ways to be like ice volcanoes and the inherent danger of studying an environment like that.

Cool. Do you know how I know about the Europa report? No. Because I'm in it. Are you really? Yes! Get out! No, it's my office, I ain't getting out. You get out. So what are you doing here? It was a cheap shot. So first, it's a nicely done, lower budget sci-fi film. And it's called the Europa Report. They try to take a different angle on how you might make a movie.

So this is a mission to Europa to see if there's life there. And the entire movie are just the cameras stitched together from the different cameras in the ship and outside the ship. So throughout the entire movie, it's like, camera three, camera six. Someone walks over there, camera eight. And so it is the report of this mission assembled by basically the video cameras positioned around the ship. So that's the premise for it. And they used a clip of me being interviewed by the news saying, I wanna go to Europa, because it has an icy surface and an ocean below, and I wanna cut a hole and go ice fishing on Europa, see if anything swims up to the camera lens. So they used that clip of me, and it paid me too. I totally made, I forgot

it was like $ 1, 000, I said, yeah, good. There it is, let me think, okay, do it. So it was an interesting attempt, and you're right, the surface is very unstable, because it's ice sheets floating on water that is being heated, and they're heat sources, and so when you heat water under ice, the ice is not stable, it breaks, it refreezes, and you can have an ice phenomenon that you might not otherwise be familiar with. That's cool, man.

Yeah, I think I read where they see the fissures change on Europa, and that's how they know that this ice is melting and refreezing and melting and refreezing.

And if you find life on Europa, we'll call it. No. Europeans. Oh, no. We've got to take a break. Oh, God. Help us. Help us, Europe. We're going to take our next break. When we come back, more on StarTalk. We're talking about sci-fi in movies, TV, and literature. We're back, StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. By the way, we are...

recording this in my office at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. Better known as the Cosmic Crib. The Cosmic Crib. We haven't done some Cosmic Cribs lately. We haven't done some Cosmic Cribs. We'll come back to Cosmic Crib and do some episodes. We got Chuck Nice, of course. That's right. Jason, professor.

The professor of sci-fi. You know... That should not be allowed. That's too fun.

That is a pretty cool title.

How many kids take your class? Is it one of the more popular classes?

It's one of the more popular classes, yeah.

Look how he's so casual. Just happens to be the most popular on all of campus.

I've taught at Georgia Tech as well as here at City Tech, and students always want to sign.

Up for it. Very, very cool. Well, we're featuring my interview with Gail Ann Hurd, one of these highly prolific producers of really innovative science fiction material from the Terminator trilogy riding up through The Walking Dead on television, which went through how many seasons was that up to? Clearly she's not, it's a shame she hasn't come into her own.

She's got to figure out her, she's still figuring life out. She's still figuring things out. She'll get there. So I had to ask her, What was it like to work in two completely different media? Television, where there are multiple stories that, or you can develop more subtleties within a story over many episodes, and a movie where you gotta go and get the job done and get out. So I'd have to understand. How does that work? Let's check it out.

What I've discovered, having been both a feature film producer and a television producer, is that with a feature, you spend two, maybe three years making a two and a half hour film.

It's a one shot deal.

And so you've got to get all that character in, you've got to get all that plot in, you've got to wrap it all up. So the television series, we have 10 hours.

So those 10 installments.

Yes, there are 10 episodes.

So it's a 10 hour movie.

It's essentially, yes. So we get to learn so much more about the characters, dive so much more deeply, not only into that, but into the mythology, into the world.

And into the conceit of the storytelling.

Yes. And the stakes are so much greater because you can unfold them and, you know, unspool it more slowly and get more and more invested.

Because when you do a movie and you have to get all of that out in the hour and a half or two hours, it looks very forced. Exactly. And not only that. To completely open up a character.

And that's one of the constraints of the medium. And television is much different. You know, you can... Once you're connected, you know there's going to be so much more. I mean, the idea, let's say a film like Inception, there's not a sequel. So if you really wanted to follow these characters into the future, that's not happening. Or if it does, it'll happen five, 10 years later.

So tell me, Jason, tell me about the difference between developing a cool science tech storyline and developing the characters. within the story? Because it's clear that a movie has a harder time developing people than a 10-hour movie or a 10-hour TV series would. So as a consumer of this medium and a teacher of it, how do you split that?

Well, whenever you're thinking about television, obviously you have a lot more time to develop not only the characters, but do the world building necessary for the audience to really engage in the ideas of the show, like with Star Trek, for example. But whereas like a film, you have to jump right in and get straight to the point. Otherwise you could either lose the audience or it could slow the pace of the film down so much that the audience begins dozing off. Also another issue that relates both to series and film has to do with novels, that when you write a novel or short story, you can provide interiority, you can provide the thoughts of the characters, which you can't really do on film or television other

than flashbacks.

In awkward ways.

In awkward ways, exactly.

Except Japanese anime, where they're always doing that. That's all they do is give you the interiority of what the character is thinking. It's always what the character is thinking at all times. Is that a word, interiority?

I don't know.

It is, yeah. And you picked it up like that? You act like you knew that word your whole life. No, I knew it for 30 seconds. That is all I need.

So that's interesting how clumsy it can be to get inside someone's head without having them via whispered narration over their thoughts.

So what's a mechanism as a writer that you can use to portray the thought patterns of a character without doing that, you know, that they're showing the close up of the face and it's just like.

And they look off at us.

And they're looking off and it's just like, I don't think I can do this. I'm not sure if I can make this happen. Like, you know, what can you do?

And maybe really good actors can convey those emotions just by their facial expressions.

Oh my God, you're absolutely right. Yeah, like Meryl Streep, I think that's one of her strongest points.

But you're exactly right that things about nonverbal information from facial expressions, the way a person carries themselves, the tonality of their voice, but also your film techniques like the cinematography, the way the shot is framed, the color scale that's used for background or foreground.

I think music can carry some of those too.

And obviously music is the biggest thing.

Which you don't have in a book. Right, right, right.

And this is the thing is not to say that one medium is superior to another. Each of them have different affordances, things that they can do and constraints, things that they can't do in order to tell a story. And I think a master for a storyteller uses the medium's affordances to their maximum capability. to be able to tell the story, but also involve the audience and those emotions and those characters.

I have affordances too, by the way. I just learned two words today. How's your affordance? So nowadays with streaming services where they'll drop an entire series all at once, do you think the future of sci-fi is bright because now sci-fi can have the same kind of treatment as other long, dramatic stories that have been dragged out multiple episodes have done in the past? I think so.

Maybe a good example would be The Expanse.

Yes!

Oh my god, I was just about to say that! I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He didn't give you that affordance.

I get very excited, but that is a people listening, if you get the chance, watch The Expanse.

I found it by mistake, and four days later... I was sitting there unshaven and smelly. I was like, this is so good. There's no higher compliment in modern times. Exactly. But they do the science well. And who's streaming this?

I think it's Amazon, if I'm not mistaken. But they do the science well, and it was cool because I sit at the feet of the master all the time here, and I get to hear and learn a lot about what really happens in space. And one of the things that they do very well is, is let you see that in zero gravity, you are a helpless little baby.

There is nothing you can do. And they do it really well. But anyway, I'm sorry, I got excited. I interrupted you, go ahead, the experience.

But you make a really good point about like you stumbled onto it by mistake, right? And I think that with streaming services and this new way that we're consuming media actually may introduce science fiction to more people now because they just stumble onto things or try something out in a way that was harder to do in the past where you had to tune into the channel at a certain day, a certain time. And if you didn't, well, then you totally missed it. But now with things being shared on social media, recommendations, or things that you find just browsing through Netflix or Amazon Prime.

To jump in the middle if they can start at the beginning. Exactly. So you got them. Right.

And the cool thing about the expanse is they take the geopolitical relationships between countries that we have right now, and they expand that to become inter-solar relationships between between people who are born in the asteroid belt, in the Kuiper belt, people who are born on Mars at 38% gravity, and Earthers. And so over this long period of time, human beings have kind of, you know, not really involved.

So if they're born on Earth, are they birthers? That was good. Chuck, that was good.

I'm going to give it to you only because I'm a birther. But, yeah, and it's really, it's very funny because the prejudices that we hold towards one another here on Earth now just becomes different prejudices that we hold towards each other based on which planet or which region of the solar system that you're born in.

So, Jason, let me ask you, Are there untapped, possibly low-hanging fruit available for the sci-fi author now that we have these media, these new ways of delivering storytelling?

I think so. And Netflix has jumped to this, like with the streaming of the series Black Mirror. They take new things that we're all very familiar with and just push it a little bit into the future, near-future science fiction.

So that it's, you can almost touch it. Right. But not quite.

Right.

To just almost touch it enough to scare the bejesus out of you. Right.

But it's through this platform of being able to stream a series of movies or just watching one individual episode, I think immerses people in these ideas and gets them thinking about them in a way that science fiction is given to as opposed to other media where it's more just about a dramatic story.

So there's another aspect to this storytelling that I think I briefly touched discuss with Gail Ann Hurd. And it has to do with not only are you imagining the science, but how much of the science are you getting right and what value that might have to your audience? Let's check it out. I think, and I'd like to get your verification of this or falsification. I think we live in a time where if you get the science right, there is an entire other following that the movie will pick up. in the blogosphere where people compliment the science that it gets right and it gets talked about for months beyond the normal marketing period. Like the Martian? Like the Martian. Like the Martian. And so I'd like to

believe that gone are the days we just make stuff up because you think it looks better and then you alienate an entire community of people who could have praised you for doing it accurately. And the more we are in this era that I'm thinking we're entering, the more pressure there is on producers, directors, to bring in a scientist and maybe.

By the way, we had scientists on each of those films.

I don't believe you had a single scientist on Armageddon.

We've had multiple scientists on Armageddon.

You're lying.

Including futurists from NASA. In fact, we even shot in the neutral buoyancy... In Houston.

Yes. In fact, there was a whole scale model of the Hubble telescope submerged there so that the astronauts who would be servicing it you know, it's kind of, it's not perfect zero G, but you get that floaty feel to it. And so, yeah, that's good.

Good.

But I'm saying.

I am not arguing with you. I am not arguing. At least we knew that we were breaking those laws.

So Jason, how do you feel when you see bad science in a film?

I don't think it's necessarily always a bad thing, but I would say that It's unfortunate today because obviously audiences are more well-educated, and I think there is a certain expectation that the science is right.

Do you agree with me about the blogosphere? There's a whole geek community that cares about real science.

Oh, I think that you're absolutely right about that. But I can also say as a warning, like when Sunshine by Danny Boyle was released, I saw it in a theater in Liverpool, England. And after the film was over, I was complaining to all my friends quite vocally about how bad the science was in parts of it, especially about, like, restarting the sun. And unbeknownst to me.

Sorry, I didn't see the movie, but they restart— that sounds kind of cool, though.

It is kind of cool, except it's a very small, like, nuclear package that they use to— Kickstart things.

Kickstart the sun. Matters of scale here.

We get a big lighter up there.

My pilot light went out. Yeah, go on.

But what unbeknownst to me was that Danny Boyle's family was sitting in the row behind me. And they kind of leaned over and gave me some dirty looks and made me a little uncomfortable. And I thought about it, and it's obviously a tremendous success for someone to be able to make a film, right? To realize their artistic...

At all, right. But I do think that if you were going to be putting these millions of dollars toward making a film, why not make it a film that has more real science, that can teach people as well as entertain them?

True, true. I mean, you.

Sometimes it's like, what's the movie where they basically play around with the tenets of string theory and Matthew McConaughey.

Interstellar.

Thank you.

Yes. And so.

I loved all the questions that they posed in the movie, but then it comes down to love.

So I never thought about it until this moment. Maybe Interstellar spent... too much time on getting their science right and not enough time on the emotion and the interpersonal stories that would be embedded within it. Yeah, there's a balance. Yeah, there's gotta be a balance. There's gotta be, otherwise, yeah.

So you can praise it for its science, but then if there's no story, or if the story is not otherwise convincing novelistically, then what do you have at the end of the day? Because I think we're all fundamentally storytellers, story listeners, even as adults. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I think it's core to being a human being is really stories, you know?

Related to this is Hugo Gernsback, the father of science fiction, started the first science fiction magazine in April 1926, Amazing Stories. And he defined science fiction in part as being 75% romance and 25% science. I didn't know that. Nice. That's early. And so even from that beginning point of what we think of as modern science fiction, there was this idea that you have to have a balance between being able to tell a story that is about people while bringing in to show how science and technology influences and affect people and how people respond to those challenges.

Nice. Excellent. I'm going to go home and write a story right now. The way I think of this is, yeah, you should try to get the science right, but don't. Don't let that stop your creativity. But often there's newly discovered science in any branch of science that might be more creative on its frontier than you can be trying to make stuff up. So why not reach for that edge?

My field, that edge overflows. We gave you wormholes, black holes, the vacuum of space. antimatter, that's photons, lasers, we gave you that. Jason, do you see him bragging? I don't mean to brag, but, so, because I can tell you, there's a famous quote from J.B.S. Haldane, and it's, the universe is not only stranger than we have imagined, it may be stranger than we can imagine.

Ooh.

Which to me says that there's no greater source of material to mind for science fiction storytelling than the science itself. Just make sure you get that three quarters romance. And that is a cosmic perspective. You've been listening to possibly even watching this episode of Star Talk. I want to thank you, Jason. Thank you, Chuck. Yes. For this episode.

Thank you, guys. This was great. Okay. And until next time, as always, I bid you to keep looking up.

StarTalk Podcast_ Creating Science Fiction_ with Gale Anne Hurd

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