This week, journalist Dan Sinker talks with Annalee Newitz about Annalee’s recent time-traveling, punk rock novel The Future of Another Timeline.
This is the second of four conversations with science fiction and fantasy writers in honor of Ray Bradbury’s Centennial on August 22. Admission to the AWM is also free of charge that day to celebrate Bradbury’s work and lasting legacy. Interested in more sci-fi talk? Listen to the previous episode with J. Michael Straczynski.
We hope you enjoy entering the mind of a writer. Listen to more episodes here.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
“I wanted to tell a hopeful story. I wanted to tell a story about how people can suffer setbacks and really, really horrific things and still be resilient and still find allies and change things slightly for the better.”
“Do you change history by getting a big group of people together to transform things, or can it be just like a dude comes along like Anthony Comstock and makes a bunch of laws?”
“Part of the book is sort of about what it’s like to have technology that’s so advanced that it’s part of nature and what happens when you have to kind of use nature as a machine. You can’t just dig the machine out and take it somewhere. It’s this piece of the earth’s crust.”
“One of the conceits of the book is that it’s really hard to change history. If you go back and kill Hitler, you just get like Bitler or Zitler or Mitler because of the fact that Hitler represented a social movement. It wasn’t just the one guy, it was this whole movement of white supremacy and it wasn’t just gonna go away if you got rid of the one bad guy.”
“There’s predators out there and sometimes you gotta stick your thumbs in their eyeballs.”