7 Years of Correct Opinions!

Charlie Jane, this is our last episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. We started this thing back in 2018. We've done 188 episodes, if you count today's episodes. So how are you feeling about ending it? Man, I have so many feelings. I'm really sad because I've loved doing this podcast, but I'm also just so proud, so incredibly proud of this podcast and of the community we've gathered around it and of some of the folks we've gotten to talk to on this podcast. I just feel like it's been such an enriching thing for the last, like, seven years. And I'll miss it, but I'll also just always look back on it with so much fondness. Emily, how are you feeling about it? I mean, I'm also sad. I'm definitely going to miss our listeners, who I always imagine are out there, like, making a meal or sitting on transit or, like, petting a cat. I'm convinced that the vast majority of our listeners have listened to at least one episode while petting a non-human creature. So I'm going to miss all of you out there and your cats and other creatures, many other types of creatures. I'm also really glad that we're ending this pod while it's still, like, hale and healthy. I did some math, and if you look at this show, in streaming TV season years, we've had basically almost 24 years of show, if you assume an eight-episode season. And even if we were lucky and, like, say we were one of those shows where they gave us, like, 10 episodes per season, we would still have done 19 years of TV. So we put in our time. We made a thing, and it was really good. And there was that crossover episode where the other TV shows came in, and we had to, like, fight each other. Anyway, sorry, go on. That actually did happen. We have had a couple of crossover episodes, so, like, we've really, like, gotten all the value we can out of our 19 seasons. So Charlie, what was one of your favorite things about doing the pod? I know it's hard to pick a favorite, but, like, what is a favorite thing? Super quickly, I'll just mention, A, you know, just getting another avenue to talk to you all the time. You know, I mean, we talk to each other constantly anyway. But just, like, having an excuse to just really nerd out about, like, topics that are interesting to both of us, like, on a regular basis, like, you know, it's just nice to have that extra structure and that extra reason to be doing that. The other thing that I just am really, that I loved about doing the podcast, there are people who I really wanted to have a chance to talk to in some capacity who would have been hard to get to talk to otherwise, like, when we got Mike McMahon to come and talk to us about Star Trek Lower Decks, or, you know, some of the TV people that we've gotten to talk about their creations, some of the science people that we've gotten to talk to. We've had just some incredible guests on this podcast, and just, you know, we wouldn't have gotten to talk to those people any other way, I feel like. I think that's probably my number one thing, too, is that having an excuse to talk to people whose ideas I really admire. Like, I mean, like a lot of nerds, I'm pretty awkward about introducing myself to people. And so having a podcast just gives me an excuse to send emails to someone who I really like and whose work I'm really enjoying and just say, like, hey, you know, want to answer my questions for, like, 30 or 40 minutes for this podcast? It's a great way to meet people and geek out with them and have, like, a structure to do it in. So if you are like me and you have a hard time naturally doing that, we've made really good friends through this show and, like, have gotten to connect with people who we never would have just run across normally. So yeah, that's been really great. All right. You are listening to the final episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. The podcast that tried, tried so hard to be about science fiction, but wound up being about everything. I'm Annalie Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction writer. My latest novel is called Automatic Noodle. Who are you? I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My latest novel is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. I've already talked about it a lot. It's about a witch who teaches her mom how to be a witch, and, you know, you can get it everywhere. Yep, check it out. Those are some good holiday gifts, y'all. Yep. Buy books for the holidays. You don't have to buy our books, but buy somebody's books. You know what I mean? Yeah. Just buy some naturally occurring books. None of these, none of these Franken books written by A.I. Oh, yeah. So today we're going to say goodbye to the pod by talking about the current state of science fiction. We learned a lot about the history and context of science fiction, fantasy, and horror while making the show for almost seven years, and, you know, we have some thoughts. And we're going to tell some stories about making the show, and we will definitely conclude by telling you what we're up to next and how you can find us. But also I wanted to make sure I said at the top that if you are paying us through Patreon, which is the only way that we get funding for this show, we're going to press pause on that so you will no longer be charged. If you need a refund because you've paid in advance for stuff, just let us know. We're going to give refunds. But please stay tuned to this feed. Stay subscribed to our RSS feed wherever you get it, because as we're going to talk about a little later in the show, it's very likely that we're going to use this feed for another project that we think you're going to like. So, all right. Let's get to the end. So, Charlie Jane, can we talk about 21st century science fiction yet? I feel like now that we have a quarter century under our belts, we can start to make some generalizations without feeling too guilty about generalizing. What do you think? I think we absolutely can. When you think about like the 21st century as being like basically 25 years at this point, you know, in 1975 or 1970, nobody would have had a hard time talking about post-war science fiction. Correct. Like post-World War II. And we would have all known it was post-World War II, unlike in 1935 when they might have had a different view. So I think that 25 years is plenty. And I think that, you know, the 21st century has had some big, big events that have shaped the stories we tell. Like 9-11, like the rise of cell phones and, you know, like COVID. There have been certain huge incidents that you can look at and be like this changed science fiction and fantasy in this really kind of marked, noticeable way. I think that that's true as well. And I mean, science fiction is not about predicting the future, as many folks have said on the show. And as we have said, it's about reflecting on the present through a skewed lens or through metaphor. And so, of course, it's going to respond to what's happening. Through a scanner darkly. Yeah, right, exactly. To bring in a metaphor from a previous century, from the post-war period. So let's talk about a few of the big themes that we see threading through 21st century science fiction so far. I've made a little list in my head, and actually it's in the doc as well. I see the list. It's a good, it's a really good starting point for like a conversation. One of the things on your list is the rise of like anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist science fiction. And this kind of goes hand in hand with another thing in your list, which is the diversification of science fiction. Perspectives that were kept out of the genre are now being allowed into the genre, and in some cases even sometimes centered in the genre. Centered and leading the genre. Yeah. But also, one of the big stories of the 21st century has been the rise of inequality and the legacy of colonialism coming back to roost in various ways, and like environmental racism being kind of an ongoing colonialist project. You know, science fiction has had to respond to this kind of inequality and ecological colonialism, if you want to call it that. Yeah. I mean, I think that inequality... that environmental science fiction definitely was part of the late 20th century, but it's transformed in the 21st century. And I think you're right that it's connected with decolonization as a theme. And it's funny, because science fiction of the 20th century, and really the late 19th century, is all about colonization. Like, it's a huge, huge theme. Whether it's colonizing other planets, or arguably in Frankenstein, it's about colonizing someone's body, or colonizing people's bodies. I think now, you're much more likely in a science fiction story to see questioning colonization, or stories that are even about decolonization. Like Deep Space Nine, which is not a 21st century story, but it's a cuspy story. It's like right at the end of the 20th century. That's the whole point of the show, is we're decolonizing, and how do we do it? One of the really big sci-fi series of the 21st century, the Ancillary Justice series by Anne Leckie, is also very explicitly about decolonization. And arguably, Broken Earth is too. The Broken Earth trilogy, which is another huge, influential series by N.K. Jemisin. Although I think, I would argue that Broken Earth is about a lot more than that. And it also isn't really about being decolonized, because these characters get recolonized over and over. So, it's anti-colonial, but not necessarily decolonial. Right. Yeah, I've been struck by the sheer number of books I've read in the last, I want to say, 10 years, where the main character is someone from a colonized or subaltern culture, who gets, you know, kind of co-opted or assimilated by a dominant colonizer culture, and then has to struggle with kind of conflicting loyalties. The example that comes to mind immediately is Babel by R.F. Kuang, where the main character is from China. And that character is fully co-opted. But The Unbroken by C.L. Clarke comes to mind, where it's all about someone who was from a colonized group, but was raised by the colonizers, and identifies with the colonizers, and sees their own people as barbaric and terrible until they learn better. That is a huge theme throughout speculative fiction of the 21st century. Like, I would say across the board, your typical sci-fi fantasy protagonist, more often than not, is someone who has been kind of taken in by colonizers, or taken in by the oppressors. But they're trying to decolonize themselves. Like, that's often... That's what the story is about, but they start out kind of with this loyalty to their oppressor, and they have to unlearn that. And even if you look at a lot of romanticy, a lot of romanticy is about, like, I'm from a humble background, or I'm from this community that is marginalized, or that is stepped on, but I'm falling in love with someone who's from the dominant group, or I'm joining the dominant group, or becoming part of the dominant group, and falling in love with somebody from the group, but also realizing that I have to resist or reject these colonizers or oppressors. Or, yeah, I mean, Fourth Wing, like the classic kind of big romanticy narrative, like, it's entirely about, like, oh, I've just discovered that the dominant group has been erasing history and revising history, and actually the bad guys are the good guys, and the good guys are the bad guys. Oh my God. Which is great. Like, I think it's actually handled really well in that book. I know I've raved about it on here before, but I think it's kind of a surprise decolonization story. Like, you don't expect it, because, you know, it's romanticy, and you're like, oh, it's just going to be fucking dragons. But no, it's actually also fuck the state. Yeah. Not in a happy way. And this kind of dovetails with the next item on your list, which is Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism and kind of diverse futures. And, you know, I'm so happy that Julian Brave Noisecat is having this incredible success with his new book. We had him on our podcast to talk about Indigenous Futurism with Rebecca Warnhorse a million years ago. I feel like, obviously, these are things that were around before the 21st century, for sure, in a lot of ways, you know. But they've kind of been centered more, and they've gotten more notice from the mainstream, quote unquote, in the 21st century. And they've been taken on board by the culture a little bit more. I mean, and I think some of that comes from, like, the success of a movie like Black Panther, which gives us not just a story about Afrofuturism, but gives us an aesthetic for it. That's one of the things that so many critics have talked about with Black Panther, the first film, is that the aesthetic of Wakanda, the design of the city, the design of their technologies and their fashions and their hair, and everything about their culture, is a way of imagining a future that many, many people in the United States have never thought about. Because they imagine the future as the Apple Store, or as something from Christianity, or something from European traditions. And they're like, oh, the future will look like futuristic Europe. And they never imagine the future looking like the future according to, you know, the Lakota, or the future according to a mishmash of different African nations. I think that's so powerful. Having an aesthetic really helps people imagine what's going on, in the same way that Blade Runner created a visual aesthetic for cyberpunk, that just reading Neuromancer might not have. But like, once you have that visual aesthetic, yeah, and so I think, I mean, Wakanda is so much the antidote to cyberpunk in a lot of ways, in like, aesthetically, but also ideologically, right? Yeah. And you know, like, Sun Ra and people like that did have an aesthetic that they created that was very visual. But Black Panther just takes it further and more and in so many different directions. Yeah. And I think that like, people were exposed to Sun Ra mostly, like, people saw the concerts, but it was a much smaller group than saw Black Panther. Oh, for sure. Yeah, no, and that's kind of being centered in culture more. Yeah, being centered in like, mainstream culture, like white dominated culture is really new. And the other thing that's like, really, really important, and I do think is much more a 21st century occupation, is the idea that, you know, Indigenous cultures aren't something that only exists in the past. And again, like you said, people have been saying this for the entire time that Indigenous people have been around. But now I think that that idea is being centered in mainstream culture, slightly more often. And the idea that like, Indigenous people will exist in the future, you know, there is a future to Indigenous cultures, there is a future to non-Western cultures in the Americas. And that's, again, a real change, you know, like, it's really been the case that mainstream culture, we can say white dominated mainstream culture, has thought a hell of a lot about Indigenous culture as a thing that happened 500 years ago. They haven't thought about it as a thing that will be happening in 500 years, which it will be, because that's how culture works. It's like, it does survive, it changes, but it'll still be there. And it might even be there in a way that's much more central than it is right now, you know, and that's what Julian Brave Noisecat's new book is about. Partly, I mean, it's a memoir, but he deals a lot with like, yes, we will continue into the future. Arguably the most successful science fiction media franchise of the 21st century is James Cameron's Avatar, which is severely, has many flaws, as we discussed in our Avatar episode, but is about kind of trying to center Indigenous people, trying to like, think of Indigenous people as having their own kind of technological perspective in the face of like, you know, Oh yeah, it's an Indigenous futurism for sure. And you can argue, I think, very plausibly that it's appropriation, but it is also an homage. It's appropriation and homage. It's messy. Yeah, it's what white people do. It is created by white people to try to celebrate like indigeneity in a way that it hadn't previously been kind of. Yeah. But I think that's what we're talking about is like when you start to see mainstream culture centering aesthetics that are not Western, that's a shift. And the other thing I was going to say, I want to talk a little bit about cozy fantasy, but I also want to talk about another giant franchise of the 21st century, which is Lord of the Rings, which of course is from the past, darling. And we have had, there was a successful or semi-successful Lord of the Rings, I guess cartoon. I don't think it was that successful. Okay. Influential. An influential Lord of the Rings cartoon back in the 70s, I guess. But it had never really achieved the level of dominance that it has in the 21st century with the Peter Jackson films. And then now of course, Amazon is doing all these spinoffs and there's like been all kinds of other Lord of the Rings related culture and Lord of the Rings inspired fantasy, which I think does go into cozy fantasy. And I think it's interesting because Lord of the Rings is an anti-war trilogy, the original Lord of the Rings. It's anti-war and it's also very much about how industrial warfare destroys the environment. So the reason why Lord of the Rings became so popular in the 1960s, about three decades after it came out, is that I think it was picked up by young people who were worried about the environment and worried about how war was wrecking their societies, but wrecking nature also. People who'd seen images of napalm and were like, what the hell? We're burning all life. I think it's interesting that Lord of the Rings has come back at a time when we're worrying about the same questions, we're worried about the rise of fascism. Again, Lord of the Rings is explicitly about World War II. So it makes sense that that's become a story that we're re-imagining and reawakening and that it's not going away. The whole 21st century, there's been some gigantic Lord of the Rings something happening, some franchise or piece of a franchise. And we're just turning it over in our minds, like fascism, destruction of the environment. What are we going to do about it? Lord of the Rings gave us Game of Thrones, which also was based on 20th century source material. But it gave us Game of Thrones, gave us countless other big, splashy fantasy series that were trying to catch that wave. Which again, is also kind of about fascism and warfare, among other things. So anyway, against that backdrop, we also have this rise of cozy fantasy, cozy sci-fi. I want to say cozy horror. I mean, I don't know how else to describe a show like Wednesday. A lot of talk about cozy horror lately. Yeah, yeah. Cutesy horror. And I mean, again, cutesy horror existed in the 20th century, but now it's back. How do you think about cozy fantasy in relation to some of the stuff that we've been talking about? Is it like a counter trend? I think it's a reaction to, I mean, my working theory of cozy fiction, which you and I have talked about before, is that it's a reaction to trauma, that it's a trauma response. The better cozy fiction, like Automatic Noodle, deals with trauma kind of explicitly and deals with healing from trauma explicitly. But I think it's implicit, even if it's never talked about. And I think that it's about like a refuge from trauma. And I think that when we talked about 9-11 and COVID and fascism and smartphones and just everything, there's a lot of trauma and a lot of just like anxiety that we are all being forced to deal with. And a lot of our pop culture, a lot of our media culture is a response to that. Can I say one quick thing about cozy fantasy and then I want to go back to the thing on my list? Is that okay? Yeah, of course. Charlie was like looking away and playing with her cat, so I was like, not sure. Sorry, the cat was like, Dr. Sassy had something important to tell me. If Charlie was like, no, you may not say anything else about cozy fantasy. Dr. Sassy really needs to talk to me. We should keep this in. It's very important. I think we definitely should let listeners understand how many cat incursions occur behind the scenes. And normally our wonderful producer, Naya, edits it out. So I, oh, I wanted to say, I went to this great event the other night for Julie Leong, who just has a new book out, A Cozy Fantasy, called The Keeper of Magical Things, which is really incredibly great. I'm like about halfway through the novel and I just love it so much. So one of the things that Julie Leong was saying is that when she writes a cozy fantasy, she thinks of it as a world where she deliberately leaves out certain things. And what makes it cozy is partly the stuff that gets left out. And for her, I think one of the things she talked about was like, there's just no sexual assault in this story. There's just no like, you know, violence in this story. But one of the things that she didn't mention that's really interesting about what you were saying is that there's also no social media. There's no media. There's no like telephones. There's no, there is a character who has kind of the ability to speak across vast distances. It's like one of their magical talents, but she doesn't really use it. You know, it's like, it's a spell. Like it's a big deal to use it. Like you don't just pull it out of your pocket every two seconds. And so I was just thinking like, I wonder if one of the pleasures of cozy fantasy is like recovering from the trauma of phones and social media. Like imagine a world where we're all exactly like how we are now, but we don't have phones. Anyway, that's just a little thought. Also shout out to a really great cozy fantasy. So back to what you were saying, your theory. You have a discourse that I really want you to share about romanticy and YA. Yeah. Okay. So we were talking about this before recording. So one of my kind of pet theories, which I talked about in this article in the LA Times a while ago, is that basically a lot of the big book trends of the 21st century have been YA first and then kind of romanticy came up as YA was fading in the early 2020s. Yeah. So my theory is that there's a population of adult readers who gravitated towards YA because they wanted love triangles, they wanted like heroes who were just, you know, totally awesome but also totally like having to deal with like horrible stuff. But like they wanted that kind of like that romance and that heightened emotion and that heightened everything and that they were getting that from YA for like many years. And then basically what happened is at a certain point, those people all abandoned YA for various reasons and instead started reading romanticy. And so I think of romanticy as basically a continuation of almost in some ways of YA under a different label. Like the adults who were reading The Hunger Games like 15 years ago are now reading Fourth Wing. Or Twilight. Or Twilight. It's a lot of the same people for a lot of the same reasons. And I did talk about this theory a little bit with Holly Black, who I think I convinced Holly to agree with me or to sign on to my crackpot theory. One of the great YA authors of the 21st century, Holly Black. Yeah, who is now writing adult fiction. Yeah. Or at least has been. She's incredible. Yeah. And I mean, that is, that's interesting that she made that transition too. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, Veronica Roth is another example of someone who transitioned from like dystopian Hunger Games-ish YA. She wrote the Divergent series and now she's writing adult fiction. Yeah. That's also like really interesting sci-fi. She's writing some fantasy but mostly sci-fi. And so she's kind of made that transition as well. I kept saying to you like, oh, I think it's people who grew up reading Hunger Games and Twilight that are now reading Romanticy. And I think you were right to correct me and say no, no. I mean, yes, it was that. But also it was adults who were reading YA who are now reading Romanticy. I think YA got like really overrun for a while there with like a lot of adult readers who kind of, they didn't crowd out the younger readers, but they definitely like started making YA cater more to their tastes. I just want to like touch on a couple other items on your awesome list of like things that you brainstormed about like trends in 21st century science fiction. So you talk about like backlashes and review bombings and like the weaponization of fandom. of fandom, which is a huge theme of this, and it kind of goes along with the rise of the internet. The toxicity of the internet has leached into fandom, and it has led to, you know, everything from actors of color being harassed for being in Star Wars or being in other big franchises, like Ghostbusters or whatever, like Leslie Jones got harassed for being in Ghostbusters. Or like the Rings of Power series being review bombed because it has black elves and dwarves in it, which is not historically accurate, darling. I mean, so silly. But anyway, yeah, there's a lot of stuff like that. I included this on the big list because we talked a lot about diverse science fiction, indigenous futurism, Afrofuturism, and those are very progressive in a lot of ways. You know, anti-colonial, decolonial science fiction is very progressive, but there has also been a right-wing backlash to that within culture, but also specifically within fandom around sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. And I would say one of the themes of the 21st century for me is what I'm calling the weaponization of fandom, where fans are being organized to engage in like coordinated attacks against particular stories or particular creators. Usually these are marginalized creators or, you know, women or people of color or various other trans people. And it's part of culture war, but it's also a reaction against the fact that science fiction has become more inclusive and people are upset about that. Traditional sci-fi fans from like the 1950s or whatever, who are supposedly cis white men, even though we know in the 1950s, there were tons of women and people of color who were enjoying and writing science fiction, that was the stereotype. And I think there's still people who want to go back to that stereotype. And so that's been a huge ongoing, and I think will continue into the 21st century and keep mutating and becoming even weirder than we ever imagined. So I would say that's a trend to look out for is that, you know, fandom is now a weapon. It's not just a community. Piggybacking on that, I feel like another huge trend in 21st century science fiction has been kind of what I'd call toxic nostalgia or like just kind of curdling nostalgia. Nostalgia that's kind of gone a bit off. It's gone a bit off. It's starting to smell a bit. And like, you know, and this has just been across the board, like at the start of the 21st century, like in the year 2000, there had only been like four Star Wars movies. There'd been a smattering of superhero movies. You know, there was nostalgia, but it wasn't at the level we're at now. We didn't have the thing of like just endlessly recycling franchises, endlessly like throwing in Easter eggs and what people have started calling member berries to try to like people use that term a lot lately. I would just like to try to cater to it's like a dingleberry of fandom. Kind of, yeah. Things that try to cater to like longtime fans and be like, Hey, remember this thing you saw back in 1975? Here it is again. Oh yeah. Oh, look. That kind of thing, which Hollywood has really gotten into in the 21st century in a whole new way. They really went all in on it to the point where now it's kind of gotten a little bit kind of sad. It stopped working as well. It stopped being as effective. A bunch of these things that used to be surefire hits are no longer surefire hits because people are just like, they've been pandered to so much and they've been just, you know, we don't really need another Indiana Jones movie with like an 80 year old Horse and Ford. No, we need another Sinners. There's a reason why Sinners did so well because it was a new thing. Yeah, exactly. And we don't need more Tron. We don't need more. Like it's just everything. And like this kind of like endlessly recycling nostalgia has become such a motif of the 21st century. And I think it's eventually we're going to flush a lot of the 20th century out of our system and we will eventually like be like, oh yeah, there used to be all these 20th century things and we've forgotten about them now. The way that we don't really talk about Doc Savage anymore. Yeah, not so much. Yeah, it was funny because I had this weird thought about how at the moment when the Supreme Court in the United States is obsessed with originalism, which is going back to the original text of the Constitution and various other laws and trying to interpret them the way people would have interpreted them 200 years ago. That's kind of what originalism is. We're kind of getting originalism in our stories too. Like what is the proper way to interpret Star Wars? And like how would, you know, George Lucas have done it? And like, I don't think that like, you know, J.R.R. Tolkien would have liked to have black elves, you know, that kind of thing. It's like, what? This is not a legal text, kids. Very much the same impulse, I think, yeah. Yeah, it's the same impulse and also wrong for the same reasons because culture changes. And so, you know, culture changes and therefore our stories need to change and so do our laws. One thing that I'm really sick of from the 20th century that I am really hoping the 21st century will flush away eventually is that I feel like we're kind of stuck in a cyberpunk paradigm and that cyberpunk is dead. And what I mean by that is not that cyberpunk sucks because, in fact, I love cyberpunk. William Gibson and his buddies and like lots of cool people like Pat Cadigan created science fiction that deeply influenced me and that I do not want to write myself because I don't think that we should still be in that paradigm. I think the problem with cyberpunk is that it has become our real life. You know, we are living in the cyberpunk era now. We're in a kind of techno dystopia with oligarchs and corporate control of all of our resources, ubiquitous surveillance, people escaping into virtual reality, the dramas that unfold online, blowing back into real life and vice versa. You know, it's true it's not exactly like, you know, Snow Crash and Neuromancer, even though, you know, freaking Mark Zuckerberg is trying to build the fucking metaverse from Snow Crash. You know, I think that because of the fact that we are living in a kind of cyberpunk dystopia, like science fiction needs to move on. And randomly, I was emailing with Charles Tan, who's this amazing writer and editor in the Philippines, and we were complaining about like cyberpunk is what's happening now and like what comes after cyberpunk. And Charles was saying what he thinks comes after cyberpunk, and I'm just going to quote from what he said, is that there's a new wave of science fiction that might be thinking about things like learning to cap certain investments and thinking about too much growth at a rapid rate leading to destruction. So stories where people are like, not engaging in just like constant capitalist production, but actually trying to implement caps on growth and like sustainable production. But also he was saying he feels like learning to reuse old tech or rediscovering old technology is also a kind of post-cyberpunk aesthetic or idea, which brings me back to the popularity of things like Game of Thrones or Wheel of Time. You know, these are kind of set in fallen worlds where they're trying to rediscover either old technologies or old magic and rebuild them and reuse them and make them relevant again. And so I love that idea. I love the idea of something that comes after cyberpunk, which is basically about like recycling caps on growth, you know, ways of imagining a future where we aren't just endlessly making more techno shit and like putting surveillance cameras up our butts and stuff. So anyway, thanks, Charles Tan for coming up with that. That is awesome. I love Charles Tan. Yeah, and also hopefully that, you know, is an inspiration for people. I think that's already happening in a lot of sci-fi. To go back to Broken Earth and N.K. Jemisin's trilogy, I think a lot of Broken Earth is concerned with exactly those questions. And like the rise of solarpunk and like eco-punk and things like the Becky Chambers. I'm ready to get rid of the punk. get rid of the punk suffix, please? SAMANTHA BEE, PH.D.: Same, same, same, same. Can we just talk about, like... SAMANTHA BEE, PH.D.: Let's have plonk, plonk instead. SAMANTHA BEE, PH.D.: Why don't we just come up with something else? Like, it'll happen. Like, somebody will come up with something, but it's not gonna be... Because I feel like as soon as you say, solar punk or hope punk or whatever, that you're still in relation to cyberpunk. I want it to be after that. SAMANTHA BEE, PH.D.: Same. So, I eagerly, eagerly await whoever coins the next subgenre phrase to kind of sum this up. Please do not use punk. Maybe you can use funk. I might permit that, but maybe not. Maybe, like, come up with something else. All right, so I want to conclude by talking very briefly about something we've talked about a lot on the show, which is queer horror. Yeah. And that is a huge 21st century trend. So, tell me more, Charlie Jane. I mean, it's interesting. I've been reading a lot of queer horror lately, and it's funny, because what I was thinking is... Back in the 20th century, we had a lot of transgressive queer fiction. Mm-hmm. Including by people like Samuel Delany, who are in the science fiction community, and some of his stuff was science fiction. Some of it wasn't. Dennis Cooper and stuff like that. Dennis Cooper, you know. Also, he's very much in dialogue with fantasy. Like, the novel Frisk, a lot of that is about, like, Lord of the Rings stuff, weirdly. Yeah, a lot of transgressive queer fiction, a lot of transgressive queer erotica. Mm-hmm. A lot of just, like, messed up kind of queer stories about, like, BDSM or, like, gross stuff. But I feel like the 21st century has seen it, like, just lots of bodily fluids and, like, you know. But also stuff like Dorothy Allison, like, Bastard Out of Carolina, dealing with transgressive subjects, like, not in a gross way, but just being like, yeah, like, child abuse is a thing. And that's hugely important in a lot of people's lives. And we often don't talk about it. Yeah, but so when I read a book like, you know, Moonflow by Bitter Corella, or You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White, or The Game in Yellow by Haley Piper, those feel to me like they are a continuation of transgressive queer fiction, but through a lens of, like, the fantastical or the, though, just more weirdness, more kind of unreality kind of creeping in, which I think is very appropriate for the times we're living in. And so let's take a quick break and then talk about our favorite episodes of the podcast. All right, so we're gonna go through this pretty quickly. We don't want to, like, you know, fill your ears too much on this very final episode, but I wanted to mention a few of my favorite episodes. I want you to mention a few of your favorite episodes. I wanted to start by just saying, I already mentioned at the top that, like, one of my favorite things was getting to interview people whose work I enjoy. And so it was really cool. Just a few months ago, we talked to C.L. Polk, who writes some of my favorite books, and it was really great to be able to reach out to them and be like, hi, I just really want to hear about how you write such great stuff. So that was a great episode about description. But also because I write a lot about history and archeology, it was really cool to talk to Jamal Bowie. We had him on to talk about how we can learn from history, history of the Civil War specifically, to, like, think about what's happening in our modern moment. He's always wonderful, and you can follow him on Instagram and hear him talk all the time. But also we had a great episode about historical writing where we had two incredible, iconic writers, Nicola Griffith and Tananarive Due, same episode. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. The two of them together. It was incredible. I, like, felt like I was just... I don't know. It was a really unbelievable moment, and, like, I'm really, really glad that we have that, like, and that the future will have that, because they come at their historical fiction in a way from really similar places, but because they are from such different places, like, geographically, they take really radically different approaches. And so it was so fantastic just to hear them talk about their process, their research, like, the personal investment in their histories, as well as, like, the political investment in them. Anyway, and they're both, obviously, just giants of the genre and, like, just incredible writers. So, wow. Still warming my heart thinking about that. Oh, my gosh. How about you, Charlie Jane? Yeah, I mean, when I think about episodes I'm really proud of, I really love the Star Wars episode we did where we had Elena Rose and Annalise Ophelian, who were both associated with this documentary about women in Star Wars or women fans of Star Wars called Looking for Leia. And it was just so great. That was such a wonderful conversation. I am still really proud of some, a lot of the science episodes we've done. I just, I love getting to be, like, I really want to learn about the blood-brain barrier and, like, getting a blood-brain barrier expert to come in and talk to us about it. And, like, just some of the political conversations we've had, like, you know, you already mentioned Jamal Bowie, but that was so great. Oh, my gosh. And, like, just getting to do things like where I went back and re-watched every single episode of the Battlestar Galactica reboot. That was so cool. That was just, it was really fun to do that and to kind of just think about the whole thing as, like, one work, like, all of the series and, like, what do we get from it and how does it hold up and how does it seem now in retrospect after so much time. Yeah, I love doing that with Anne Rice. I did that, we did that Anne Rice episode where I did the same thing. I went back and looked through all of Anne Rice's career. Oh, my gosh. That's always really fun. So fun. It's a lot of work, but it's really fun. It's a lot of fun. Like, if we had a podcast that was only, like, every few months instead of every two weeks, we could just, we could do, like, all our episodes could be like, here's a deep dive on this one, which maybe that's the thing we'll do in the future. Yeah, maybe it's possible. I just, you know, getting a chance to talk to creators about the things that they're creating. Like, when we were able to get, like, the showrunners of, like, Lucifer and Legends of Tomorrow, which those are two of the great shows of all time. Also, we talked to Chiraco Dunlap about Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy. Love that show. I love her. She, that was so great. And, like, you know, we were like, we want to know about the new Planet of the Apes movie. Let's get the writer of the Planet of the Apes movie, Josh Friedman, to come just talk to us on the pod. Like, just, you know, that was... So cool. Such a privilege. And I love Josh so much. Another one that you and I, I think, both are still very proud of is when we did that series a couple of years ago of, like, Silicon Valley versus science fiction, where we kind of looked at, overall, kind of what you were talking about before with Cyberpunk, about how Silicon Valley takes these, like, in many cases, dystopian visions of the future and just misunderstands them radically and turns them into crappy products that nobody wants. Yeah, and I mean, a lot of those Silicon Valley investors, for example, like Marc Andreessen, are pretty much taking their cues about how to build the future from Cyberpunk, um, and from, you know, like, Italian fascist futurism and stuff like that. I mean, it's weird to see Cyberpunk become public policy, which it kind of is right now, especially in the United States, but I think in other countries to a certain extent as well. The fact that as we are taping this, the federal government has decided to deprive, like, millions of Americans of their SNAP benefits, their food stamps, that's a Cyberpunk public policy right there. You know, that's just like, okay, you're on your own. You need food? Well, you're gonna have to, like, scrabble in the dirt. And, you know, meanwhile, you know, Elon Musk is, like, eating an endangered species on his jet, you know, or whatever. He's eating nanobots on his jet. Yeah, it's really disturbing, um, to see the misuse and weaponization of science fiction that was designed to criticize what's happening, not to endorse. So, yeah, I loved doing that. One other episode I wanna call out that I think did not get enough love, we did an episode about water disasters right around the time that the United States was horribly flooding. And we interviewed Kyle House, who is a USGS geologist who studies the deep history of the lower... of the lower Colorado River. He's spent his whole career focusing on the lower Colorado. He lives near the lower Colorado, so he knows how bad it is. You know, the river is basically drying up. I mean, we're losing that source of water due to mismanagement. And right before we interviewed Kyle, there were catastrophic floods in his city, in his neighborhood, as a result, again, of bad land management. That he understood really well. He lives in Arizona. So there were these horrible floods. And because he understands flooding better than pretty much any other person in the area, he helped his neighborhood build berms to guide the water in a rational way so that it would do the least amount of damage. And part of that meant that he had to sacrifice his backyard. So they had to break down walls and let the water flow through his backyard because he understood that you can't force the water to go into a path that it's not gonna naturally take based on the gradations of the land. He's like, look, I know where this water is gonna flow. So either we can go with the flow and minimize the damage, or we can try to prevent that and potentially cause even greater, more catastrophic damage because the berms won't hold if you try to guide the water in the wrong direction. And so, yeah, they guided the water safely through his neighborhood, had a minimum of damage. And to me, it was like such a great example of how if you have people with engineering and scientific knowledge, they can help rescue communities from disasters. And also how rescuing a community from disaster might mean some sacrifices. Like now he's gonna have to rebuild part of his backyard, but the trade office, he still has his house. So, and his name is Kyle House. Wow. And right now he's on furlough because he works for USGS. So shout out to Kyle House and thanks for all your work. All right, so Charlie Jane, let's talk about what's next and then sign off. Yeah. So I wanna reiterate that this is our last episode. If you are supporting us on Patreon, we will pause the Patreon, you will no longer be paying. If you paid in advance, we will happily give you a refund. Just contact us through Patreon. You can also contact us at ouropinionsarecorrectatgmail.com. And the other thing I wanna reiterate is that stay subscribed to this feed because we'll be back with something. It might not be for a year, but I would definitely, we will let you know on this feed what we're doing next. And hopefully it'll be something that you really like and you'll wanna stay subscribed. Hell yeah. So Charlie, what are you doing next? Tell everybody where they can find you, what you're gonna be up to while we're not writing episode scripts and doing research for the show. Man, I mean, the main thing that I'm gonna keep doing that is gonna continue to be a big part of my week is my newsletter, which is at buttondown.com slash charliejane. And it's not always the same day of the week, but I always put out one newsletter a week and it's usually like a noodley essay about something or a bit of memoir about my life. Or something about some piece of writing advice or an interview with somebody interesting. It's different, like it's a different topic every week. It's not just the same topic every time. Sometimes it's kind of political. Sometimes it's kind of nerdy and weird, but it's like once a week, it's a free newsletter. And that's gonna keep being the case. I will continue to be on social media, but you know, honestly, I don't have a lot of faith in the future of social media. So depending on when you're listening to this, if you're listening to this a few months after we recorded it, who knows where that's gonna be. But I feel sure that my button down newsletter will still be there at buttondown.com slash charliejane. And probably once we're no longer doing the Patreon for Our Opinions Are Correct, not probably, definitely I'm starting a Patreon for myself to help pay the costs of the newsletter. Plus I would love to just, you know, if people wanna support me, I'd be super grateful for that. Cause you know, you'll be really mean a lot to me. And that's pretty much it. I'm gonna keep doing the newsletter. I'm gonna have a Patreon. I'm working on more books. I have a book I'm working on right now that I'm super excited about. I've got a couple of novellas that I need to finish polishing up that I'm hoping will come out sooner rather than later. And you know, I'm gonna do some comics writing that is too soon to talk about because none of it's finalized or like, you know, in the bag but I'm talking to some comics people about doing some really exciting projects. So keep an eye out for those too. Excited. And I'm still going around. Annalee, what do you got coming? You started to say you're still going around. What does that mean? I'm still traveling. I'm still visiting various places. I'm, you know, you might see me in your part of the world. I'm gonna be on the East coast a bit in November. Amazing. Okay. I also have a newsletter. It is very irregular, but if you wanna subscribe it is buttondown.com slash the hypothesis. And I post whenever I'm moved to post. I definitely use it as a way to let people know when I have books coming out or really interesting articles. Probably now that we're not doing the pod I'm gonna get into a groove of updating it more regularly. I like to kind of use it as a way to talk about interesting science and tech stories. Cause I don't have a lot of outlets right now to talk specifically about science as much. So yeah, it'll be like a mix of science. Shit that I'm working on, weird ideas. So that's a great way to stay in touch with me. I'm also on blue sky and mastodon and I'm like pretty active on both, you know I'm there every day and checking in and saying hi. I do have a monthly column in new scientist magazine which I've been doing for about six years now five or six years. Crazy. I started in 2019 and yeah, it's out every month and it's behind a paywall for the first week or two but then it comes out from behind the paywall. And I always host on blue sky and mastodon when it comes out. In fact, I have a new one that's about to be out which will be long out by the time you hear this. And I also am working on a couple of books. I have a new novel that'll be coming out in the fall of 2026, which is called a wall is also a road, which is about a slime mold. Who's a grad student who's studying earth during ancient Rome. So it has like slime molds and ancient Rome and academia. How can you turn that down? It's got everything. And I'm also, I just signed a contract to write a another book about archeology. So a nonfiction book, it's called celebration and it's an ancient history of parties and celebrations and like the rituals around them. I've just started research on that. I went to Greece last summer researching it. I'm about to drag Charlie to central Asia to retrace the silk road and go to a bunch of cities that were part of the Sogdian civilization which I'm writing about in the book. The Sogdians were amazing party animals. So that I'm not sure when that will be out. It's a lot of research. It's gonna take me at least two years to finish researching that, but it'll be out. It'll be kind of a sequel to four lost cities if you like that. So that is where I will be. I'm very sad that I won't be here but I will be on these other places and hopefully I'll have a new column at some point. And Charlie, do you think we're gonna do another podcast? Like, what do you think? I sure hope so. What's the future? You know, I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna take some time to kind of think about next steps and figure out what we wanna do next. We definitely wanna collaborate on something in the future. There's a lot of just personal stuff coming up for both of us that we need to deal with. Nothing bad. We're both fine. We're gonna be here. We're still in love. We're still, you know. We're still so much in love. Yeah, that's all. That's fine. We're just, we have like some crap to deal with that's taking a lot of time. That's taking a lot of time and energy. And so, you know, I feel like we're gonna do something together and I have a strong hunch that it'll probably be some kind of podcast again. Yeah. There'll be something podcast shaped in the future. I think so. I think so, too. I mean, we really just, we've been talking a lot about how we just need to reset. We're not mad at this podcast. No, we love doing it. We've really loved it. I mean, we've been super lucky that we've gotten to work with Naya, who's, like, amazing, and is out there now if anybody wants to hire Naya. I don't know if I don't mean to speak for you, Naya. Also, shout-out to Veronica. We should give a quick shout-out to Veronica, too. I know. Our original producer who was with us for many years, Veronica Simonetti, is, like, a frickin' powerhouse. She's now working on the podcast called Criminal, which is, like, frickin' amazing. I listen to it all the time. And she's just super rad. But, yeah, Naya's wonderful. Everybody should hire Naya. Naya is the frickin' best. Naya Harmon. Naya Harmon, the best. We always give them lots of props and love, and, like, if anybody, we will always give them a glowing recommendation if anybody is like, we need a producer. So, yeah. Naya is the best. So, anyway, we've loved doing this podcast. It's been really rad. But, yeah, we just need to reset. Like, we've been doing it for a while. We were talking about how, like, well, if we just had, like, six months or a year just to kind of chill and, like, work on our own stuff, that eventually we'd figure out the next thing that we want to do together. But Charlie Jane and I have been, like, the entire time that we've been partners, we've been also the other kind of partner, which is we've been doing projects together. Like, no one remembers Other magazine. But in the early 21st century, Charlie and I did an indie magazine together called Other, which the problem was no one knew where to categorize it in the store. So, like, I don't remember where it got categorized. It was all over the place. It was all over the place. It was really fun. But, and it was like an actual physical magazine. I think that was pretty weird. So, we did this indie magazine called Other back in the day. And then we did io9.com, which was a blog, also back in the day at this point. And then we did this podcast. So, we have a good track record of doing stuff together. So, it seems very unlikely that we won't do something else at some point. Yeah. And, you know, that's where we should leave you all is just, like, knowing that we'll be back in some form. You'll be hearing from us again. You'll continue to hear from us individually, but us jointly and collectively, you'll hear from again. And, you know, we're also just grateful to all our contributors and our guests over the years, like folks like Nassim Jamnia and Wale Talabi and... Niver Gabriel. Yeah. Bethany Brookshire and everybody else who did segments for our pod and everybody else who came on our pod and chatted with us. Y'all are the best. And we're just so grateful to have all of you as part of our pod community. And thanks to everybody in our Discord, once again, for just being such great. You guys are so cool. So many cute pictures of cats and dogs. Yeah, we'll still chat with you guys in there. We're not going to close down the Discord. No, no, that'll be there forever. I mean, until they pride Discord out of our hands. Until Discord melts, which could happen. Yeah. Anyway, thank you all so much for supporting this pod. It really has meant so much to us. Yeah, seriously, thank you. It's been really rad. If you've listened to this pod, you're part of our community and we love you. And thank you so much. Seriously. Yeah, and a final thank you to Nya Harmon, who's been our producer and engineer. And to Remington, their cat, who has also helped in various obscure ways. He's a little orange boy. We're looking at him right now on the Zoom. He's so good. He's helped a lot. Charlie's cat, Dr. Sassy, has helped a lot. My cats, Ultraviolet and Infrared, have not really helped very much, but they've thought about it. They've contributed in their own way. And for reals, thank you to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for always providing the music. We've had a couple of different themes. Chris Palmer has always spearheaded that, and Katya has been there too. Yeah, we'll be back. We'll talk to you later. We'll see you around. Say hi if you see us. And we'll see you in the future. Bye!