0:00

You and Betty and the Nancys

0:02

and Bills and Joes and Janes will

0:04

find in the study of science a

0:07

richer, more rewarding life.

0:11

Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm

0:14

Indre Vizcontis. This is a podcast

0:16

that explores the space where science and society

0:18

collide. We want to find out what's true, what's

0:21

left to discover, and why it matters.

0:31

If you're listening to this podcast, like

0:34

me, you're probably a bit of a fan

0:36

of science fiction. And one of my favorite

0:38

things to discover is a new

0:40

series, especially if there are multiple books

0:43

in the series, or if the series

0:45

has turned into a TV show. And

0:47

so I was delighted to discover Silo

0:50

when it was first advertised to me as I was

0:52

watching something else on Apple TV. And

0:55

I thought, huh, that looks kind of interesting.

0:58

And after the first episode,

0:59

I was hooked. So imagine

1:02

my delight when I got pitched

1:04

with the opportunity to interview

1:06

the author and executive producer, Hugh

1:08

Howey.

1:09

If you haven't watched the show or seen the advertisements,

1:12

let me just tell you, it's about a society

1:14

of humans in a

1:16

dystopic future that live

1:19

underground.

1:20

And while sometimes I get turned off by science

1:22

fiction, in which the emphasis is on

1:25

the technology and on

1:27

the different aspects of the world

1:29

in which people live in, without any

1:31

thought to the influence that we'll have on

1:34

human behavior, Silo is the

1:36

opposite. Silo takes a deep dive

1:38

into the minds of people who are

1:41

stuck in this place, and they don't know why.

1:43

So I hope you enjoy this conversation with

1:46

Silo's executive producer and

1:48

the author of the Wool series, Hugh Howey.

1:55

Hugh Howey, welcome to Inquiring

1:57

Minds. Thanks, Andrae. Appreciate you

1:59

having me. So, you

2:02

wrote a blog post about mosquitoes

2:04

and insoles, which

2:07

made me laugh out loud. And

2:10

I actually wanted to start there because I think that

2:12

a lot of the ideas that you talk about in that blog

2:14

post have informed the way

2:16

now I think about silo and

2:19

the show, for better or for worse,

2:21

in terms of like whether it's accurate. But

2:24

why don't you give us, you know, we've actually talked on the show before

2:27

about the gene drive approach

2:29

to getting rid of humanity's biggest

2:32

killer, the mosquito. So

2:35

why don't you tell us a little bit about sort of what,

2:37

you know, how you use

2:40

the analogy of the mosquito gene drive

2:42

to help explain population

2:44

growth or decline. Well, I'm

2:47

really fascinated by the coming

2:49

population decline because it's something that we've

2:52

never dealt with as a species.

2:54

You know, we've always dealt with growth, which

2:56

comes with a lot of problems

2:58

and decline will come with different problems

3:00

that we've never really

3:01

seen before. We're seeing the whispers of

3:03

them now in some of the countries that are

3:05

dealing with this and how

3:07

cities and villages are emptying.

3:10

I was just in Japan where a

3:12

train service shut down.

3:14

It was running only because one

3:17

child was still using the train to go to

3:19

school. And once they just kept

3:21

the train running until the kid graduated and then they shut

3:23

the train service down. And

3:25

there's all kinds of incentive packages being put out

3:28

there to encourage people to have kids, which

3:30

is a huge shift from when I

3:32

was younger and people trying to figure out how to slow down

3:34

population growth. And yeah,

3:37

I think this is, I think people

3:39

choosing not to have kids is going to be really

3:42

good for the environment, but a huge

3:44

challenge for us to face. And

3:47

it's not clear yet whether it's an existential threat

3:50

or whether there'll be some sort

3:52

of balance in between,

3:54

but the bond

3:56

push was about the proliferation

3:59

of a chatbots and how

4:02

I think this is going to encourage

4:05

fewer people to date and have meaningful

4:09

human connections and relationships like what we're seeing

4:11

in Japan where people

4:13

are just choosing not to date

4:16

at all. You know, they'll go to a

4:19

like cuddle club and pay someone to like, snuggle

4:21

them for half an hour instead

4:23

of I'd put this

4:26

in quotes because I'm in a wonderful relationship that

4:28

I love but putting up with another person

4:30

is too much for some people

4:32

and we're creating automatons

4:35

that kind of fill some of those those

4:39

emotional needs without providing

4:41

the evolutionary benefit of offspring

4:45

and that could be what the you

4:47

know putting the drone mosquitoes

4:49

into the wild does

4:52

for lowering mosquito populations. And

4:55

I think like you know only an exceptional

4:57

science fiction author could see all

4:59

these threads and pull them all together in

5:01

the way that you did, you know

5:03

from just the fact that the mosquitoes

5:05

don't know that their

5:07

you know that their population is now in

5:09

stark decline if they're you know the

5:11

the victims of a gene drive right they just go

5:13

out and have sex and you know they just don't they don't

5:15

they don't know any better

5:16

just like you know in some ways

5:18

there are a lot of people who are human

5:21

beings who you know yeah and

5:23

as you say are making the decision not to have children

5:25

in order to protect the

5:27

environment but also for other reasons

5:30

and it's a kind of morally defensible

5:33

position to say you know I'm choosing not to

5:36

add to the problems

5:38

of climate change and environmental

5:40

you know waste by not having

5:43

kids right

5:44

and yet it is true that if everybody

5:46

made that decision there

5:49

there would be a lot of services that people wouldn't

5:51

have and life would as you as you

5:53

kind of describe it later on in the blog post would

5:55

look very different you'd have these like pockets

5:58

of you know the population of of

6:00

the world went down to under a billion, you'd have these pockets

6:03

of people living much more, with fewer

6:07

services, etc. And it

6:09

would look different.

6:11

Yeah, and it could create, we've had an upward

6:13

spiral with population growth of

6:16

productivity and wealth and getting

6:19

people educated and out of

6:21

poverty and all kinds of benefits. And

6:24

it's unclear what a population decline might

6:26

do, but it could start at a downward spiral where

6:28

we go back to where we came from and

6:31

become very... And maybe

6:33

it oscillates between those two extremes. I'm

6:36

really motivated by Fermi's Paradox.

6:38

I think it's fascinating that we don't

6:40

see evidence of other intelligent life

6:43

having scanned the sky for decades.

6:47

My entire life, we've been looking very

6:49

closely for any kind of radio signal, any kind of sign

6:52

of advanced technology. And we

6:55

could be the first, which is unlikely, but

6:58

someone has to be the first. But

7:01

there are other solutions to Fermi's Paradox,

7:03

which is that whatever gets you

7:05

technology also results in your

7:08

extinction. It was actually

7:10

one of that question that led to the

7:12

plot of a wall, which became

7:14

the TV show, Silo. I was really trying

7:17

to figure out, okay, what are some of the ways we could go

7:19

extinct? Because I don't think it's as easy

7:21

to imagine as the

7:24

plethora of post-apocalyptic stories

7:27

that we have. We write environmental

7:29

collapse and that all humans are extinct, which is so

7:31

unrealistic. There'd be so many niches

7:34

that would thrive with different kinds

7:36

of environmental change,

7:38

and even nuclear holocausts couldn't do it. So

7:41

it's difficult to come up with a way that we could

7:43

all go extinct, but

7:45

all of us becoming so distracted with other

7:48

things we could do at that time that none of

7:50

us are raising families is definitely

7:52

one of them. And interestingly,

7:55

in the TV show, the runner

7:57

up to Mayer is the guy who runs IT.

7:59

which I thought was really

8:02

interesting. And the mayor, of course, is the person

8:04

that runs everything.

8:05

So, okay, so

8:07

for people who haven't seen it yet, silo

8:09

is about a community of about 10,000 human

8:11

beings. When the show begins, you

8:13

don't know why they are

8:16

living in the silo. In fact, they explicitly,

8:18

in the first words of the show, tell

8:20

you that they themselves don't know why. They

8:23

just know that that's how it is and they can't

8:25

leave this silo, this 140-floor

8:27

underground burrow.

8:33

And so, I wondered when you were conceptualizing

8:35

this whole idea, did you have in mind

8:38

an apocalyptic event and

8:40

then kind of go backwards from there? Or did you

8:42

start with just the premise of here's this isolated

8:45

community and

8:45

what is it going to be like? Yeah,

8:48

I had an event in mind. I wasn't

8:50

sure if I would ever get to it, but it's

8:53

when you spend a lot of time writing a story,

8:55

you spend way more time outside

8:58

of the writing process thinking about the story. While

9:01

I was at work, I was working a day job at

9:03

the time at a bookstore, and you're

9:05

not just writing in your head,

9:07

you're thinking about the world of your characters in

9:10

your spare time. And even

9:12

when I wrote the very first short story, I just wanted

9:14

some idea, okay,

9:16

where and when and why are these

9:18

people here?

9:19

And there

9:20

were a few things I was fascinated with at the time.

9:22

I

9:23

don't know if I should mention what

9:25

the thing that wiped everybody out is because it's probably a

9:28

good spoiler if we get enough seasons to tell

9:30

the whole thing.

9:31

But I did come up with what I thought was

9:33

a reasonable way that humanity

9:36

could get wiped out and how we

9:38

would respond to that. And in

9:40

my imagination, the silo

9:43

and the people living there is the answer to

9:46

that threat. You know, I'm glad to hear that there

9:48

is an idea there because there was a part of me that was a little bit worried

9:50

that it was like one of these shows that

9:52

isn't going to end satisfyingly even

9:54

after 17 seasons because they didn't

9:57

think through that part.

9:59

One of the fascinating things about the

10:02

show is that because no

10:05

one knows in the silo what happened,

10:07

there's also this question of did anything

10:09

happen? Or are these people just like,

10:12

you know, powering the way The Matrix,

10:15

you know, set us up to think that we could

10:17

just power AI somehow,

10:18

they're like generating something that, you

10:20

know, some other being is then exploiting.

10:24

And so there's just so many psychological

10:26

games, even in the first episode of like,

10:29

I guess we should spoil just a little bit, like what about

10:31

the cleaning? Because I think that's like that comes up

10:33

pretty quick. Okay, so it's like, right, right

10:35

out the bat. Yeah.

10:36

So like, if you're in the silo, and you

10:38

say the words, I want to get out, that

10:40

immediately gets you out. Like,

10:43

there's no going back from that. It's kind of a

10:45

suicidal statement to make. It's

10:48

a suicidal act. Because

10:50

what happens is they put you into this like spacesuit

10:52

and they send you out of the silo. And

10:55

anybody who's in the silo can only see the outside

10:58

world through these sensors, these cameras on

11:00

some part of the silo

11:01

outside, and they get dusty

11:04

over time because nobody goes out. And

11:07

so, so anybody who who says

11:09

this and then wants to go out is given

11:11

the opportunity to clean off the

11:14

camera. And and everyone's

11:16

like, well, why would anybody you know, why do people clean

11:18

like they don't mean people who are inside, they don't understand

11:20

like why the person would choose to do this, even though

11:22

they've been kind of ostracized and, you know, potentially

11:25

sent to their death by by being sent out

11:27

to clean, I don't know, there's all these layers. And here. And

11:30

then, you know, of course, the question is like, well,

11:32

so why are they cleaning? Are they cleaning to show

11:35

that there's, you know, the people who are inside that there's

11:37

a better world out there and everybody should go out.

11:40

But then, you know, we see this out of consequences,

11:42

too. So, you know, I

11:44

wanted to just ask your

11:46

thoughts about sort of the the

11:48

way that you you position the story is

11:51

very much about this psychological

11:54

experience of being siloed and not

11:56

knowing your

11:56

history, not knowing why and not

11:58

necessarily trusting.

13:41

comments

14:00

about the book over the years about why

14:02

would they forget all this 140 years? And

14:04

to me, it seems pretty obvious. Like we just don't

14:07

are interested in our histories. And that was kind of one of

14:10

the metaphors baked in.

14:11

The cast system came

14:14

because I just started, uh,

14:16

I got out of a career

14:18

of working on yachts where the

14:21

way the boats are laid out in these layers, I

14:24

mean, the very bottom layer is the bilge

14:26

and it's just full of like terrible

14:29

smells and brackish

14:31

water sloshing around and all the pumps and wires

14:34

and machinery. And

14:36

one level above that's where the crew quarters are

14:39

and where

14:40

people like myself had to stay and

14:42

the level above that's where the guests got to stay.

14:44

And if you keep going to the very top, you find the owner

14:47

laying on a sunbed, drinking

14:49

a

14:49

cocktail that was like served to him or

14:52

her. And so this stratification

14:55

on the boat very much mirrored our metaphorical,

14:58

stratification of society.

15:00

And yeah, I found something

15:03

like really kind of absurd

15:05

and humorous about that, like

15:08

how literal things are laid out. I

15:10

mean, we value height

15:12

and getting, you know, the ability

15:14

to survey our surroundings. You know, King of the Hill

15:16

is like one of the first games I learned to play

15:18

when I was a little kid.

15:20

So it was really easy to create

15:22

this like layered society

15:24

where your cast followed your physical

15:26

location. I was seeing very similar things.

15:28

I mean, people live in penthouses, the, um,

15:31

the corner office, you know,

15:33

there's all these, uh, things baked into society

15:36

that followed the same system as the silo. And

15:40

I want to talk a little bit about, um, the it

15:42

department and, uh, you know, there's

15:45

this much ado about the it ahead of it

15:48

being really revered. Like, you know,

15:49

it's going to be the next mayor. And yet we don't, at

15:51

least in those first few episodes, see a lot of evidence

15:53

of people using technology. Like there's not like people are

15:56

on their phones or, um,

15:57

or

16:00

watching screens all the time, which could have been a choice

16:03

you could have made. If we're stuck

16:05

in the ground, do we just sit

16:07

in a constant virtual reality entertaining

16:10

ourselves by walking around? I think other

16:12

people who would have written this book

16:15

or these series of books would have just put people in

16:17

VR goggles or had like

16:19

VR parks and things like that. But you don't

16:21

do any of that. Instead, you've chosen even

16:24

some of the elements within the IT department are very

16:27

retro. I love the look. I

16:29

don't know if you thought about this. This was the came with the TV show

16:31

or with the designer, but I love the fact that the desks

16:34

are like the ones that you see from the 60s

16:36

where they're like heavy, metallic, everything

16:39

just like fits that aesthetic of like, this

16:41

is going to be around forever.

16:42

It's durable. It's

16:45

very retro. Well, that is very

16:47

deliberate. It's in the books as well that

16:49

the tech

16:50

to me, it was kind of inspired by the

16:53

Panama Canal technology. We built

16:55

this thing that just kept working for

16:58

decades without needing to be refitted

17:01

until quite recently

17:03

because it was very simple tech and it was built

17:05

to be robust and to not fail

17:07

and to have backups on backups.

17:09

It's how the military and government

17:11

like build things where if

17:13

you've seen like the laptops, the

17:16

latest and greatest laptop that's rated for like

17:18

military spec, looks like it's from 20

17:20

years ago because it's thicker and bulky and

17:22

blocky and they look weird, but

17:26

the technology is quite advanced where

17:28

if you drop the thing, the hard drive parks

17:30

itself before it crashes. Building

17:34

for robustness is very different than building for

17:36

consumer grade. That

17:38

might be a hint as to who

17:41

built this and why and hopefully

17:43

these kinds of visual clues are

17:45

there to make things make sense once you find

17:47

out answers.

17:48

It's very deliberate. It's not just

17:51

an aesthetic choice. It's a

17:54

practical result of answers

17:56

that we'll eventually call them in the

17:58

show.

18:10

And there's another thing that I noticed too, and it's very clear

18:12

to me in the opening credits

18:14

with the music and which

18:17

by the way I felt to me was it

18:19

reminds me a lot of Westworld. I don't know if that

18:21

if that's this anyway, but if that was deliberate or that was

18:23

just a coincidence, but there,

18:26

you know, as you see the silo in

18:28

the kind of art of those opening

18:30

credits, a lot of it looks like DNA,

18:33

right? There's like a double helix structure, etc. And

18:35

yet within the show, there

18:38

isn't the sense that they have, you

18:41

know, that the medicine is

18:44

so

18:44

far advanced, you know, in that way too,

18:46

which is another kind of often when

18:49

people write novels about the future,

18:51

they write about like how we've solved, you

18:54

know, the problem of our biology. So can

18:56

you talk a little bit about the sort of, you

18:58

know, the analogy of

19:00

the structure of DNA and the silo and

19:03

then your approach to what

19:05

people's physical health and medicine looks like

19:07

in that space? Yeah, it's definitely

19:10

deliberate. It's also in the books that

19:12

this central staircase is like this

19:15

strand of DNA.

19:17

I think the best clue

19:19

I could give here is that anything

19:22

that seems like it doesn't

19:24

make sense is a hint as

19:26

to what happened to the world and the people

19:29

behind the creation of silo. So

19:31

if there's something that it seems like, why

19:34

aren't they more interested in this or why did they not

19:36

know about this? Maybe that

19:39

is leads people to what

19:41

destroyed the earth, if

19:44

the earth is destroyed, and why

19:46

you wouldn't want people delving in

19:49

those things again. So there's

19:53

even a small hint in

19:55

the second, the first episode when

19:59

Alison is... is looking at the back

20:01

of a hard drive with a magnifying

20:03

glass. And she's like, do you have anything more powerful?

20:06

And George tells her that's

20:09

as powerful as it gets. You're

20:11

actually not allowed to have magnification

20:14

greater than that. Interesting.

20:17

It's against the rules. And

20:20

that's a hint that maybe

20:25

there's a distrust of people being

20:27

able to see the very small

20:29

and

20:32

so all these things that I

20:34

love watching the speculation, like why is there no elevator

20:36

and all these other things? Every

20:39

one of those is derived

20:41

from the answer of what happened.

20:44

And once you have that answer, all these

20:47

things click in a place that makes sense, which I think

20:49

has been satisfying for readers over

20:51

the years.

20:52

And it doesn't all come at once. Like when

20:54

you read the books, it's doled out

20:56

a little bit at a time. And

20:58

we're going to try to do the same with the

21:01

TV show

21:02

and make sure that

21:04

ends of episodes will tell you either something

21:07

about a character or about

21:09

the world they live in. And at the end of seasons,

21:12

we'll peel back one whole layer

21:14

of this onion and show you that there's

21:17

way more underneath.

21:19

And that's that to me is the joy

21:21

of writing in a serialized fashion and

21:23

telling a serialized story on TV as

21:26

you get to keep having small

21:29

endings within a larger framework. And

21:32

it's not that common, at

21:34

least historically, for the writer

21:36

of the story to be the executive

21:39

producer of the show. So

21:41

can you

21:42

tell us

21:43

how like how you made this

21:46

shift from in the books where you essentially

21:48

stick to one character and

21:50

tell the story of one character? And so over the

21:53

course of several books, you can

21:55

piece the story together, but you've got these different voices

21:58

versus making the choice that now for the.

23:56

in

24:00

the plot of book two, which is Marnes

24:04

and Johns going down to meet her. And

24:06

that takes place over the next two episodes really.

24:09

But from here forward,

24:11

I think it's clear in episode four that

24:14

this is mostly going to be Juliet's

24:16

story. But just like in the books, we're going

24:18

to be bouncing between her and

24:21

her friends in mechanical

24:23

because her role and

24:25

her actions at the very top of the silo are

24:28

going to reverberate throughout the entire silo.

24:30

And that's to me what gets

24:33

really exciting is when this person who

24:35

didn't even want this job starts

24:37

to tug on this one string and

24:40

everything starts to unravel. And

24:42

it's a psychological unraveling,

24:45

it's a character piece, but

24:47

it's got so many mysteries and twists

24:49

and turns that

24:51

I think it satisfies on that kind of thriller

24:53

level as well. Because you're interested

24:55

in or you've done a lot of reading in psychology,

24:58

I wanted to ask you how

25:02

your creative work differs

25:05

when you know that you're writing for

25:08

people who are going to read it, versus you're

25:10

crafting something that they're going to watch.

25:12

And let me just preface this by saying,

25:15

you know, I, you

25:18

know, I see a lot of benefits of

25:21

reading, especially for

25:23

kids, because we know that it helps them develop

25:25

imagination, it helps them develop empathy,

25:28

it also helps them kind of develop

25:30

the muscle of thinking

25:33

and knowing themselves, because

25:35

they can go and put themselves into other

25:38

characters. And, you

25:40

know, people keep saying the book is dead. And then, you

25:42

know, yet another Harry Potter comes along.

25:46

Right? There's like, but

25:48

from

25:48

an author's perspective, I wonder if you could tell us

25:50

whether you have strategies that are very

25:53

different and over maybe they're

25:55

more subtle and something that you just do because

25:57

you know how to do your craft well.

25:59

And if there are things that you are like, okay, well, this is for

26:02

television, we need to do X, Y,

26:04

and Z in terms

26:06

of how we tell the story versus how

26:08

I've been telling it in the book.

26:11

Yeah. I love your

26:13

point about the value

26:16

of reading. I think the thing that it does

26:18

the best for us is help us

26:20

practice empathy.

26:21

Because when we're reading a book, even

26:23

if it's in third person, a

26:25

well-written third-person story

26:28

really puts you in the mind of the character.

26:30

And since you can't see the character, you become

26:33

the character and you feel, you

26:35

know, if it's well-written, you're feeling what they feel. You

26:38

see what they see, the smells,

26:40

the emotional reactions, their thoughts

26:42

become your thoughts.

26:44

And you can't replicate that in

26:47

film and TV because you can see that person

26:49

that's not you doesn't look anything like you and you're seeing

26:51

it from the outside. But when you're reading,

26:53

you're sensing everything from the inside. I

26:55

think books occupy a very unique

26:58

space in entertainment that

27:00

maybe VR is the closest thing we could

27:03

get to taking

27:05

the place of. But

27:07

when you

27:08

go from writing a story like Wool,

27:11

which was very psychological,

27:13

very much a lot of people's thoughts

27:15

and theories going on in their own minds

27:18

and translate that into

27:21

a visual form, you can't show

27:23

what people are thinking. So you have to rely

27:25

on your actors to emote and show

27:28

through their craft what they're going

27:30

through.

27:31

So, for instance, in the books,

27:34

Juliette is

27:35

not nearly

27:38

as cantankerous as the

27:41

Juliette of the TV show because

27:43

her mind is unraveling and she's, you

27:45

know, dealing with these deep concerns

27:49

internally.

27:50

And we read about them when we feel them, we know them.

27:53

So when we're showing her on the screen,

27:55

we have to have her embody those kinds

27:57

of same dark thoughts. And

28:01

it's a completely different set

28:04

of tools. I

28:06

think, and the other thing is like uncovering

28:09

a mystery. You can't have someone sitting at a computer

28:11

screen uncovering a mystery.

28:14

You can do that in a book, it works great. You know,

28:16

they're reading letters, they're reading, because the person

28:18

holding the book is also reading.

28:20

So you're transmitting the mystery

28:23

in a medium that they understand. But

28:25

that's the most boring thing in the world to

28:28

see on screen. So we have to figure out how to make things physical.

28:31

But these are all challenges that you know, you

28:35

get to play with in a room full of creative people

28:37

and you toss out ideas and you figure out how we're gonna make

28:39

this visually interesting. And

28:41

it's a lot of fun. I really enjoy that collaborative

28:44

storytelling. Yeah, it's an interesting

28:47

challenge to now put those thoughts into

28:49

actions, which of course is what actors

28:51

train so long to do is how do

28:53

you show somebody what your

28:55

motivations are just by what you're doing without

28:57

overdoing it or underdoing it.

29:01

There is a lot in the storyline

29:05

about trust and belief and

29:08

who's trusting who and what

29:10

these rules are. And

29:12

so I wonder if you have

29:14

thoughts about the importance of

29:17

rules in a society versus free

29:19

thinking versus knowledge. Cause there's a

29:21

lot of, you know, people

29:24

talk about how they don't know why they're here and

29:26

they're just gonna accept that. What do you think

29:28

is the role of understanding and knowledge

29:31

in our society? And

29:33

you know, maybe that'll get us into generative

29:36

AI and these new chat bots and

29:38

how that might be changing, how people trust

29:41

authority and sort of where they're getting

29:43

their information.

29:44

Knowledge plays a huge part of the

29:47

story. When Alison

29:49

is cutting the birth

29:51

control out of her leg,

29:53

the knight is sitting on a plate with an apple

29:55

and the metaphor there is like, she's

29:58

getting knowledge and getting. truth about

30:01

this, the world that she lives in, and it

30:04

is, um, she's

30:06

probably better off not having it. You know, it's like,

30:08

it's going to lead to her exile

30:11

and, and what appears to be her death.

30:14

And the same, you know, with the

30:16

mythology of Eden, even though it wouldn't have been an apple,

30:18

but it's become an apple and,

30:20

and our retelling of it that,

30:23

uh,

30:23

and Pandora's box and other, uh,

30:26

there's many different myths of this that like humans

30:28

are curious and that curiosity

30:31

gets us in trouble.

30:32

Um, so that's a big

30:34

part of, of the story. And

30:36

it's a big part of the, what the

30:39

builders of the silo would have seen as a

30:41

threat to humanity

30:42

is our innate curiosity. And

30:45

I think that's not a spoiler because, uh,

30:48

in the first episode,

30:49

Allison has this person approach

30:51

her and say, you

30:53

know, you're not the kind of person they want having

30:55

kids. That's right. Because she's

30:57

the kind of person who asks questions. And so you see

30:59

that

31:00

there seems to be a

31:02

selective breeding process going on here,

31:04

where if they're choosing who can have kids,

31:08

look in, look in the story and see who doesn't

31:10

have kids.

31:11

Well, those, those are the threats to,

31:14

to somebody, to others

31:16

of us, those are the heroes, you

31:18

know, uh, people who still have the hope

31:21

that the world could be a better place and the optimism

31:23

and the curiosity and drive to get us there.

31:26

So all of those factors

31:28

play a huge part, not just in my thinking,

31:30

but in the plot of the, and

31:32

the world building.

31:33

Uh, and you know,

31:35

I wrote this before we knew about, um,

31:38

Snowden and the CIA

31:41

keeping information from all

31:44

of our digital communications. Like this was, that

31:46

was the subject of conspiracy theories, but,

31:49

uh, that's a big part of why it is in charge.

31:52

Like they're the ones who have all that data. And

31:55

you know, this was written 12 years ago before people

31:58

cared about like their what's on screen. social

32:00

media and how they're advertising

32:02

cookies and stuff are being used against them. So

32:06

yeah, this is all very contemporary

32:08

problems I'm kind of wrestling with and getting to put into

32:10

the story, which is

32:12

the best part of writing science fiction, I think. And

32:14

also probably an exciting thing about being able to make

32:16

a television show, you can maybe insert

32:18

things into the TV series that you

32:21

couldn't have predicted 12 years

32:22

ago as you were writing the books.

32:27

So I want to kind of

32:29

get back though to your thoughts. A

32:31

lot of people mention that science

32:34

fiction writers are prescient

32:37

that some of them, the good

32:39

ones, have an ability to sort of

32:42

predict the future. And

32:44

some of them have been quite right. We've got

32:47

a lot of evidence of 1984-like behaviors

32:49

today. We

32:52

can look to the past. Some people, obviously

32:54

some of them get some aspects wrong, but Margaret

32:57

Atwood has become a massive

32:59

star, even though what she wrote

33:01

was several decades ago. I

33:04

read it in high school and here

33:06

we are living much of

33:08

what

33:08

she wrote. So I

33:10

want to specifically, I mean, I can't ask you to predict

33:13

the future. That seems like too big

33:15

a task, but especially with

33:18

this new generative AI, these

33:20

tools, is there

33:22

something that you see that

33:24

is different in 2023 that would either influence the

33:27

way you would write your next

33:29

science fiction books or that

33:32

you think that we as a species need

33:34

to be

33:34

mindful of? Yeah.

33:37

I think the examples you bring up, 1984

33:41

and Handmaid's Tale are wonderful examples

33:44

of

33:45

how speculative

33:47

fiction authors can nail

33:49

the future. I think it happens most

33:52

often when they're writing about people and human behavior,

33:54

which is what, when we talk about Orwellian

33:57

thought or when we talk about the Handmaid's

33:59

Tale and current

34:02

issues with reproductive rights. These

34:05

are human behaviors which seem

34:07

to be repeated throughout

34:09

history. So it's really easy to tell those

34:12

stories about contemporary issues and

34:14

have them be germane

34:17

in the future. Science fiction authors

34:19

are notoriously terrible about predicting

34:21

technological change. The

34:24

one

34:25

really solid example that I've

34:27

seen is

34:29

geostationary satellites

34:31

were in Arthur C. Clarke or

34:34

in Asimov's story. And so

34:36

he, knowing some basic gravitational

34:39

theory was

34:41

able to

34:43

posit something in a story that ended up

34:45

being useful in science. Would have been co-discovered

34:47

anyway. But most of

34:49

science fiction

34:51

books are just dead wrong about everything technological.

34:54

The worst thing you can do is put a year in the title

34:56

of your book because science

34:58

fiction authors like greatly overestimate

35:01

the progress of change.

35:03

And a lot of areas of an underestimate

35:05

change in different areas like

35:07

smartphones just aren't a thing in

35:10

old science fiction stories. The Star Trek communicators

35:13

are primitive compared to

35:15

modern smartphones. You

35:17

had to, you know, your communicator was good for kind of

35:20

one thing, but you had to go have a

35:22

med scanner and you had to go

35:24

to the computer and do other stuff. And now we know that

35:26

their one handheld device would do it all.

35:29

So I think we shouldn't give science

35:31

fiction authors much credit when

35:33

it comes to technology, but we should

35:35

give really smart observers

35:38

of human behavior a lot

35:40

of credit when they write it well in the

35:43

case of Atwood and Orwell

35:45

and a ton of others. And

35:50

I fall more in the realm

35:52

of the dystopian writers for writing about human

35:55

behavior.

35:56

So if I were to predict things about

35:58

the future, it would be that we would.

35:59

would act very much like we act

36:02

now and in the past, in the future.

36:05

So I want to let our listeners know

36:07

that Hugh Howey's series

36:09

Wool, among his other novels,

36:11

is available to booksellers everywhere, and Silo

36:14

is on Apple TV+. Thank

36:17

you so much for coming on Inquiring Minds, and

36:19

I'm looking forward to the next few

36:21

episodes and hopefully many more seasons, and

36:23

you wrapping it up in a very satisfying

36:25

way. Thank

36:28

you so much. So

36:31

that's it for another episode. Thanks for listening.

36:33

And if you want to hear more, don't forget to subscribe. If

36:36

you'd like to get an ad free version of the show, consider

36:38

supporting us at patreon.com slash

36:40

inquiring minds. I want to especially thank

36:42

David Noel, Haring Chang, Sean Johnson,

36:44

Jordan Miller, Kyler Rehola,

36:47

Michael Galgool, Eric Clark, Yushi

36:49

Lin, Clark Lindgren, Joelle, Stephan

36:51

Meyer Awald, Dale Lemaster and Charles Blyle.

36:54

Inquiring Minds is produced by Adam Isaac, and

36:56

I'm your host, Indre Voskontos.

36:58

See you next time.