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The Hulu TV series stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez, and so much fantastic outerwear.
The only new show I care about this fall is Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, the show that dares to ask, What would it be like if Nora Ephron made a murder mystery?
Centered on a group of true crime obsessives who start their own podcast after a fellow apartment building resident dies under mysterious circumstances, Only Murders stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez, the picturesque and autumnal Upper West Side of New York, and a variety of enchanting outerwear.
The name of this column is “One Good Thing,” so you may be expecting to hear that Only Murders in the Building is, in some straightforward and ontological sense, “good.” I cannot do that. The murder mystery plot, which features such suspects as Sting playing himself, is best described as “pretty okay.” The jokes tend to lean on tired boomer-versus- zillennial gags (“Calls bother them for some reason!”). The show’s occasional stabs at formula breaking, including an episode with no spoken dialogue, are more notable for their laudable ambition than for their uneven execution.
What I can tell you instead is that the vibes are immaculate.
Only Murders in the Building, created by Martin and John Hoffman, with all three of the leads executive producing alongside Hoffman and Dan Fogelman, is Nora Ephron-esque in its total commitment to atmosphere. As in the best of Ephron’s work, that atmosphere is the one that New York’s Upper West Side radiates in all the purest fantasies of autumn: crisp, cozy, and bohemian. The leaves are orange, the light is golden, and there’s a chill in the air and a crackle of energy all around you. The only thing you can do in response is stride out of your tastefully decorated apartment in a strikingly oversized sweater and be adorable as heck about it.
And so we get Selena Gomez stalking down the street in a marigold-yellow faux fur jacket and plaid pants, scowling behind her impeccable sunglasses. We get Martin Short twirling past a cab in a violet wool Haider Ackermann coat, complete with coordinating purple silk scarf. We get Steve Martin preparing an omelet in front of an Ed Ruscha print in a jewel box of an emerald green kitchen. The choices are rooted in character, sure (costume designer Dana Covarrubias wanted Gomez’s clothes to look like armor, and production designer Curt Beech wanted Martin’s apartment to reflect past wealth), but mostly it’s about the vibes.
There is, more or less, a plot for all these vibes to arrange themselves around. Gomez, Short, and Martin all play neighbors in an enormous and glamorous apartment building called the Arconia. Martin is a former TV detective named Charles-Haden Savage, whose only real social stimulation comes from getting recognized on the street and who, lately is getting recognized less and less. Short is Oliver Putnam, a Broadway director who surrounds himself with souvenirs from a career of flops. Gomez is Mabel, a closed-off young woman who — Oliver and Charles note early on — is much too young and not nearly wealthy enough to be living in a building like the Arconia.
Charles, Oliver, and Mabel are all isolated, melancholy figures, but they all have one thing in common: They’re all superfans of the same true crime podcast. The building murder is just the excuse they need to start a podcast of their own and dive into the mystery. But! All three of our main characters are harboring secrets of their own!
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Look, is it groundbreaking stuff? No, but who cares? At one point when Mabel is doing a stakeout, she swathes herself in a long coat made out of teddy bear fabric that looks so cozy I felt compelled to burn down everything in my life that is not getting that coat for my own.
Streaming TV and especially Netflix has populated itself lately with a series of shows that have showy production designs and high-profile casts but are ultimately hollow at their core — shows like Queen’s Gambit and Mare of Easttown and White Lotus, shows that use their beauty and enormous budgets to present themselves as important works of art and then fail to justify their own weightiness. But what keeps Only Murders in the Building from joining their ranks is its appealingly restrained sense of scale.
Only Murders in the Building is under no illusions that it has something vital to say about sexism or poverty or colonialism. It is not aiming to reinvent the venerable formula of the TV mystery series. It offers a few pointed critiques of true crime as a genre and the general state of law enforcement in the US and then it leaves well enough alone. It just wants you to vibe, and as a result, it over-delivers where its peers underdeliver.
I, for one, am here for it. I only want one thing, and that is to be cozy and wear impeccable sweaters and solve crimes. Only Murders in the Building exists to satisfy that simple desire.
Only Murders in the Building is streaming on Hulu. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.
America’s upper-middle class works more, optimizes their kids, and is miserable.
It’s easy to place the blame for America’s economic woes on the 0.1 percent. They hoard a disproportionate amount of wealth and are taking an increasingly and unacceptably large part of the country’s economic growth. To quote Bernie Sanders, the “billionaire class” is thriving while many more people are struggling. Or to channel Elizabeth Warren, the top 0.1 percent holds a similar amount of wealth as the bottom 90 percent — a staggering figure.
There’s a space between that 0.1 percent and the 90 percent that’s often overlooked: the 9.9 percent that resides between them. They’re the group in focus in a new book by philosopher Matthew Stewart (no relation), The 9.9 percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture.
There are some defining characteristics of today’s American upper-middle class, per Stewart’s telling. They are hyper-focused on getting their kids into great schools and themselves into great jobs, at which they’re willing to work super-long hours. They want to live in great neighborhoods, even if that means keeping others out, and will pay what it takes to ensure their families’ fitness and health. They believe in meritocracy, that they’ve gained their positions in society by talent and hard work. They believe in markets. They’re rich, but they don’t feel like it — they’re always looking at someone else who’s richer.
They’re also terrified. While this 9.9 percent drives inequality — they want to lock in their positions for themselves and their families — they’re also driven by inequality. They recognize that American society is increasingly one of have-nots, and they’re determined not to be one of them.
I recently spoke with Stewart about America’s 9.9 percent — the people who are semi-rich but don’t necessarily feel it. We talked about fear, meritocracy, and why the 9.9 percent are so obsessed with nannies. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below:
So, to start out, you write about the 9.9 percent and a “new aristocracy” in America. Who are these 9.9 percent?
The statistical side of it is very imprecise. I don’t think of the 9.9 percent as just everybody who has more than a certain amount of money and less than another amount of money. I see it more as a culture, and it’s a culture that tends to lead people into the 9.9 percent of the wealth distribution. It’s a cultural construct that is defined by attitudes toward family, toward identity issues about gender and race, by education and educational status and the idea of what constitutes a good career, which is mainly professional and managerial.
What does the culture look like? How do these people separate themselves out?
The guiding ideology is essentially that of a meritocracy. The driving idea is that people get where they are in society through a combination of talent and work and study. The main measures of that are educational attainment and material well-being, and anything that we provide to society or other people is on top or on the side of that and is a reflection of our own virtue and not in any way necessary for social functioning or part of a good life. It’s always, essentially, a sacrifice.
The obvious place to look for it is the whole college admissions game. But I think that’s kind of limited, too. I put a lot of emphasis on the family aspect because I think that’s a place where you really see in operation the attitudes and practices that go into child rearing and family formation.
You have at least two very different groups emerging in American society. At a high level, you have people who have their kids late in life after getting a lot of education, have fewer kids, and invest massively in them. And then you have a large group that is much closer to the traditional style of having kids early and not investing as heavily in them — although many of them, of course, try to emulate the practices of the upper-middle class.
One of the things you write about in the book is how much this 9.9 percent are willing to invest in their children — in nannies, in schools, in extracurriculars. Where does this pressure come from, this urge people have to make their kids the best?
I think the driving motivation is fear, and I think that fear is well-grounded. People intuit that in this meritocratic game, the odds are getting increasingly long of succeeding. They work very hard to stack the odds in their kids’ favor, but they know as the odds get longer, they may not succeed.
That’s coupled with another one of the traits of this class, which is a lack of imagination. The source of the fear is also this inability to imagine a life that doesn’t involve getting these high- status credentials and having a high-status occupation. This life plan looks good, and it certainly looked good in the past when the odds were more sensible. But it’s not a great deal. It’s something that isn’t just harmful to the people who don’t make it, it’s also harmful to the people who get involved and do make it, in some sense.
In what way is it harmful to the people who do make it to the 9.9 percent and the people who don’t?
I’m not suggesting it’s equally harmful. The psychological damage to the upper-middle class is kind of trivial compared to the substantive damages other people face. But it is, nonetheless, pretty real.
I would point to the sociological and psychological evidence that you have significant increases in anxiety-related disorders and other forms of unhappiness even among people who are fairly well off. It’s a trade-off that all or most of them are willing to make. But it’s not a free lunch.
Well, even if people are on paper wealthy, they often don’t feel wealthy. They’re always looking at someone who has a little bit more than them. How does that play out here?
That’s almost the defining aspect of life in a high-inequality world. And the important thing is that it affects people all the way up.
I know people who are in the top 1 percentile of the wealth distribution who just feel incredibly poor and stretched because they’re looking around and see other people who have got just that much more and can do that much better. That insecurity is what runs throughout the system. Just because you’re in the top decile, or 9.9 percent, that doesn’t mean you escape it. In some ways, you’re more subject to that insecurity. That drives people to do crazy things to stay where they are and to avoid falling.
To what extent does the upper-middle class drive inequality, and to what extent are they driven by inequality?
Most of this culture of the 9.9 percent is an effect and a consequence of inequality. That said, it’s one of those effects that becomes a contributing cause; it’s part of a feedback loop.
Most of the root source of inequality is structural, and I think much of it goes to an economy that’s no longer as competitive, where you have oligopolies rising without significant challenge. The balance of power between what we call workers and what we call capitalists is out of whack, and that’s a fundamental source of inequality. Race and gender can also play into inequality.
That inequality does have these fundamental sources, and once it’s in place, other mechanisms come in to lock it in and to exacerbate it. That’s where the culture of the 9.9 percent comes in. This culture that focuses on meritocracy becomes a way to justify a professional credentialing game where certain categories of workers are able to carve out high rents for themselves. It’s where certainly families — because they have excess resources — are able to over-invest and lock in benefits.
Those are mostly consequences of rising inequality, but then they feed back into it in obvious ways. They lock people in place, they tend to make it harder for large numbers of people to do well, they exacerbate the irrationalities in society.
It all sounds very gloomy, but I’m not actually that gloomy. I just think this is the way human societies work. There’s nothing in human nature that says we’re particularly good at forming large, complex societies that make everybody better off. These are sort of the forces of entropy at work in human society. I don’t want to be some sort of misanthrope condemning all of humanity. My point is that we are imperfect at forming reasonable societies, and we need to understand those imperfections if we’re to do better, which we can.
We’ve talked a lot about the culture of the 9.9 percent so far, but what does that culture mean for everybody else? The people who can’t afford to super credential their kids and send them to Harvard?
I think the underemphasized concern here is the extent to which the other 90 percent end up buying into this value system to some degree. I’ve been in the child-rearing game, and I see a lot of the madness firsthand — parents freaking out when their child takes a sip of soda out of the refrigerator because they somehow imagine this is really going to make it impossible for them to demonstrate enough virtue to get into the right college. They will curate every experience for their kids — every travel experience, every friendship.
I mostly see it among members of the upper-middle class who can afford it. But increasingly, the same sets of values and practices are clearly spreading to where people can’t afford it and where it doesn’t make sense. They’re also buying into this idea that kids have to be absolutely optimized, maximized so they can get onto the narrow path that leads to a stable upper-middle- class life, and otherwise it’s Starbucks until the end of time.
It basically takes away a potential countervailing mechanism. If society were such that you produce this one noxious class but then that gives rise to a reaction of people angry with this class and then acting out, you might have some conflict. Hopefully, it’s not violent but can be mediated through political institutions, but you have at least a mechanism that might lead to a solution. But when the ideology starts to spread, it effectively removes the basis for that conflict, it neutralizes the opposition in a way, and that’s a problem. It means that the system just continues further down the road toward greater instability.
Why is there such a focus on the nanny? On child rearing?
Nannies cost a lot, you basically have to hire another full-time individual. And that is not something that most individuals can do. It’s creating a definition of success that will define most people out of the running even before they start.
[The 9.9 percent] all have internalized this idea that child rearing is meritocratic breeding, and the measure of your success is how well you optimize your child as a future member of the meritocracy.
That means that to the extent that you can’t yourself spend all of your time raising your child, you need to get somebody else to do it. And that person’s task is not child-rearing as it used to be understood, which was feeding them and preventing them from harming themselves. It’s about optimizing them, and there’s no limit to what you can do to optimize them. And so that’s why you’re going to go for a nanny who’s college-educated, preferably with a degree in child psychology, and who’s capable of organizing all sorts of enriching experiences for the child. The logic is pretty ironclad.
Generally, I don’t think it’s terrible for the kids. It’s just a model of parenting that a) is insane and b) cannot conceivably be emulated by most of the population.
What’s the role of the idea of meritocracy here?
I think that meritocracy mostly gets invented after the fact. You have significant inequality, and then you get people reimagining how the economy works. They first make the false assumption that individual merit or individual talent and effort is the main factor in production, and it isn’t. Most human economic activities depend far more importantly on the degree of cooperation that people are able to establish between themselves — cooperation within firms, cooperation between firms in a marketplace, and cooperation in a society at large in terms of having standards of trust, reasonable laws, and so on. All those things are far more important in determining economic output than mere merit or merely allocating rewards to merit.
People make this false assumption precisely because the inequality is already there, and they’re looking for a justification. Then, they make the further false assumption that the variation in human merit is tremendous — it’s astonishing that some people are literally a million times smarter than other people. You have to qualify a little bit because whenever you criticize meritocracy, someone will come back and say, “Well, people are unequal, some people are smarter.” I have no problem with that, there are differences among people, and those have to be recognized. But it’s completely false to think that those differences are great enough to explain the kind of variation that we see in the economy.
Nonetheless, all of this rhetoric around meritocracy tends to grow and becomes more convincing precisely as inequality grows. In this respect, I don’t think our meritocracy is all that different from previous aristocracy. The definition of aristocracy is just the rule of the best, and people who have merit are also by definition the best. It’s the same kind of rhetoric. Yes, aristocracy usually relied more on birth, but that’s just a mechanism for identifying the people who are going to be perceived to be the best.
And we work more in order to be able to have this merit to be perceived to be the best. That’s one of the things that struck me about your book — how many hours the upper-middle class, the managerial class, is working now to maintain their spot.
There’s no question that workloads have gone up where people are earning the most. There again, there’s this ideology of merit because we think it’s because these people are so incredibly productive. The hour of that corporate lawyer is just worth so much money that of course they’re going to work those extra two hours just to cash in on that. And it’s just so ridiculous, it’s wrong.
Those people are working hard because they intuit precisely that merit isn’t deciding who’s getting to claim these rents. They’ve got to do something to distinguish themselves from the competition, and the way to do that is just to demonstrate a greater willingness to sacrifice, a greater willingness to submit one’s own identity, and a greater willingness to obey. I see this manic work trend as some of the clearest evidence we have that the meritocracy is out of whack and inequality is far too great.
So, ultimately, what are some solutions here? How do we tamp down this pressure people feel to hang on so tightly to their status and this sense that there’s a smaller and smaller piece of the pie they’re fighting for, even among those who are quite well-off?
The solutions mainly have to do with the fundamental sources of inequality, and I don’t think those are that hard to see. Attacking the trusts and the oligopolies, that’s a very clear avenue to pursue; breaking apart some of the professional guilds that strangle the economy. Health care is an obvious place to look on both ends — on how much we spend on it and how access to it is distributed. We need to provide more public support for child care. Another avenue that’s very clear and very difficult to do is housing — we have a tremendous amount of land, and there isn’t really an excuse for the kind of housing affordability issues that we have.
This isn’t a kind of game where you need a 100 percent solution. You can get pretty far with moves that just reestablish equality on a firmer foundation. This isn’t an unsolvable problem — especially if you’re willing to aim for what’s good and not necessarily what’s perfect.
The other thing that concerns me in this debate is understanding the role of the 9.9 percent in this. There’s a tendency for members of the meritocratic class to say, “Oh, the problem is that we’re hoarding these spots. We’re hoarding spots at the elite universities and certain professions, and what we need to do is to make sure that we’re more representative in how we let people in.” Well, that’s really wonderful for people to do, but that is not going to be the solution to much of anything. It takes for granted that the hierarchy itself is justified and is economically productive, and it’s just a matter of making sure that everyone has a fair shot of getting in. Let’s say you have a society in which you have serfs and lords and you say you’re going to have a lottery where one out of every 100 serfs will become a lord every year, and every year or every generation you’ll rotate. That’s not going to make a just society, that’s going to make a perverse society. That’s a false line of solution.
So what is the role of the 9.9 percent in making this better?
The key contribution of the 9.9 percent, the culture of the 9.9 percent, is going to be to return to the actual original values of America’s upper-middle class. If you get rid of the false idea of meritocracy that everyone earns what they deserve and substitute the idea that meritocracy means holding power accountable to rational standards of public scrutiny, you have a class that can actively contribute in a positive way toward equality. There’s nothing more dangerous to inequality than a society where people and activities are held up to rational standards. There are some core values in what we call meritocracy — of holding power accountable to reason, of treating people as equals under the law, of making deliberations public, and professionalism. All of those core values are intrinsically good things. What’s happened is that inequality perverts and distorts them. The contribution of the 9.9 percent would be to pursue those.
I don’t think the answer is to put the 9.9 percent on a boat, send them out to sea, and sink it, though that would probably make for better sales on a book like this. But I do think the issue is basically a class that has allowed itself to delude itself about the sources of its own privilege, and its main contribution would be in opening its eyes and then living and working more in accordance with what I think was the original inspiration of the class.
What follows when people recognize the actual sources of their privilege is they become a little more humble and they are more willing to help other people, more willing to invest in the future. For me, one of the most distressing statistics is that the richer people get, the less they believe in publicly supported child care. It’s not that they don’t want their taxes to go to pay for child care, it’s that they’ve internalized this idea that everyone can do this, everyone can raise their own child or just hire a nanny. “Let them hire a nanny” is the new “let them eat cake.” It just shows how this incredibly virtuous, super-well-educated class becomes oblivious to the basis of its own existence.
Sci-fi author Becky Chambers explains how to build a better alien and how to imagine hopeful futures.
Becky Chambers is one of the few authors whose every book I gobble up greedily.
The sci-fi writer launched her career in 2012 by raising money on Kickstarter, meant to buy herself the time to focus on finishing her first novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. which she eventually self-published in 2014.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is defined by grounded hopefulness and top-notch space opera pastiche — it captures so many of the reasons I love Star Trek without actually having anything to do with Star Trek — and it soon found a cult fan base. That fan base has grown considerably as Chambers has published three novels set in the same universe as Planet, as well as two unrelated novellas. (The republished edition of Planet and her subsequent books have been published by major sci-fi publishing houses.)
The Wayfarers series is Chambers’s most famous work to date. It even won the Hugo Award, one of the most prestigious sci-fi prizes, for best series in 2019. It centers on a future version of humanity that has found its way into something called the Galactic Commons, a sort of United Nations for the galaxy.
Humans are one of the newer species in the GC, and we’re not particularly beloved. For one thing, other species apparently think we smell bad, a tiny joke Chambers uses to needle the arbitrariness of prejudice. (We smell how we smell, other alien species!) Each of the four novels centers on a different location and set of characters, though some characters with starring roles in one book recur as supporting characters in another.
One major quality that sets Chambers’s work apart is her skill with creating alien species. They’re just alien enough to be unfamiliar but just familiar enough to be approachable. And though Chambers doesn’t have formal science training, both her mother (an astrobiologist) and her wife (an anthropologist) do. The scientific stew that Chambers has been steeped in heavily influences how she thinks about alien cultures and planets.
Perhaps the most compelling quality of Chambers’s books, though, is that they are hopeful without being saccharine. They take place in a future where humanity figured its shit out eventually, but we still destroyed the Earth via climate change. That blend of sorrowful past and more optimistic present is intentional, Chambers says. “Hope cannot exist without pain, without trauma, without scary stuff,” she told me. “It’s the act of believing there’s something better on the other side of this.”
Chambers took some time out of a busy 2021 — both the final Wayfarers book (The Galaxy, and the Ground Within) and her new novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which kicks off a new series about a monk and a robot, came out this summer — to talk to me about creating aliens who are just human enough and imagining a hopeful future where utopia nonetheless remains just out of reach.
You’re really good at designing non-human species. They’re just recognizable enough for us to be like, “Oh, I understand the emotions and the intellect going on here,” but also just alien enough for us to be like, “That’s really different.”
One of my favorite things to do on any project is invent aliens. I always start with the caveat of: We have to have a point of entry. We have to be able to relate to them on some human level. Do the aliens in Wayfarers resemble anything like what I think actual extraterrestrial life is like? No, of course not. But you have to be able to emotionally connect with them. And I don’t know that we could [immediately do that] with other species out there in the universe that exists.
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But from there, we’re gonna get weird. I start with biology first. I look at the physicality. I look at how they are different from us. I always start with a particular trait. For example, the Aeluons, one of the big alien species in Wayfarers, communicate through the chromatophore patches on their cheeks. That starts with a real- world inspiration — squid and octopus.
I take that and blow it up to a civilization level. If color is your primary mode of communication, how does that affect your art? How does that affect your architecture, the way you dress, the sorts of technology you have? And how do you relate to other species, especially if they have different ideas about what color means or just use it as a decoration? There’s a million questions you can ask with just that one element. Everything else comes from there.
The intersections of those cultures are so important to your books. On our planet, we all come from different sets of shared assumptions. Even within a single country, there are many different ideas about how the world functions. How do you go about expanding that diversity of culture and the interactions between those cultures to a galactic scale?
I switch between point-of-view characters so often. None of the books have a single voice. So I spend a lot of time thinking about a character’s biases, what things about other species are weird to them. The things that are obvious to one species are not obvious to another.
My wife and I are an international couple. She’s from Iceland. We go back and forth all the time. And so much of dealing with that is navigating those differences. As a society, we tend to focus on big, political differences, but in my personal life, it’s these very small things. What do you have for breakfast? Do we find the same things funny? An argument might start where no one was actually mad. There was just a misunderstanding that was lost in communication. Those things are such an intrinsic part of my experience that it feels very natural to me to code them as alien interactions instead.
Your mom is an astrobiology educator, and your wife is an anthropologist. What have you picked up from them that has leached its way into your work? I realize I am basically asking you, “What have you picked up from being alive?”
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Do we have six hours?
From my mom, it would be seeing the beauty in the infinite diversity of evolution, of being able to look at things that are slimy and squeaky and weird. I have a deep affinity for creepy-crawlies, and that comes from my mom. She taught me to see the beauty in things that are different from us. Scientific literacy was a big thing in my upbringing. Even if I wasn’t going to be a scientist, she wanted me to be able to understand it and approach the world that way.
My wife’s background is in historical linguistics, the study of figuring out how people moved around and interacted with each other through analyzing how words changed. She made me think about language in a way I never really considered. Language as a concept holds a reflection of our own values in society and the ways that we perceive the world. Our interactions change the way we speak. That has bled into my work, because so much about what I write about is those sorts of exchanges and the ways that we change by just being around each other, even for a very short time.
On the astrobiology front, there’s this Neil deGrasse Tyson tweet — I’m annoyed by myself for bringing this up already — that calls out Hollywood for having aliens that aren’t different enough from species here on Earth. I feel like, by definition, if we can’t imagine it, we can’t imagine it.
But in your books and in, say, the movie Arrival, it can be a truly alien species, but humans comprehend it through a lens we’re familiar with — a reptile or a cephalopod or a crustacean. We see that in the world, too. We constantly try to relate to people who aren’t like us through the terms and customs we’re used to, which sometimes causes offense and sometimes builds bridges. How do you think about defining something truly alien?
Trying to imagine the unimaginable completely ignores the needs of storytelling. The type of aliens you create hugely depends on what the point of the story is. A story centers a particular feeling and experience. It’s not there to paint the universe as it exists. It’s impressionism. It’s there to elicit an emotional response. At the end of the day, while I’m trying to paint worlds that feel real, I’m telling a story. The needs of that come first.
I was very careful about what sorts of bodies I give to particular characters. In the first Wayfarers book, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first alien we meet isn’t that different in a lot of ways. She’s bipedal. She has hands and a face. She can talk to you. Her cultural customs are very different, but we can look at her and compare her to a reptile, something that’s instantly relatable. That was very intentional, because the minute you walked on the ship and met her, she would give the reader a sense of safety and comfort.
Whereas in the last book, [The Galaxy, and the Ground Within], there’s a character who’s a giant lobster centaur man. He’s a lovely person, but his species does elicit a feeling of, “What the hell is that?!” There’s a barrier to entry there.
A lot of choice goes into what I need a character to be and how far I’m going to push the alienness of them. How uncomfortable do I want this experience to be for the reader, and why? But in my novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate [which focuses on a scientific expedition from Earth visiting planets teeming with unintelligent life], there aren’t civilization-level species. Everything is weird and animal and not well understood. We’re just taking pictures of it and trying to figure out what it is. That’s a very different type of story.
Okay, extend that to artificial intelligences, to robots, which in your books grew out of humanity but also need to be different from us.
They are a different category, because they spring from us. I often have the same set of core ideas, which is that if they’re something we made, they would follow a logic we would understand because we wrote the code. Regardless of whether we understand why they gained sentience, we built them for a purpose, and they evolved out of that purpose.
We don’t understand what intelligence or consciousness is. We have it, but we can’t define what it is or why it exists. There are a bazillion books and theories on the topic, but we’re just barely beginning to scratch the surface, and I’m not sure we have the capability to understand those things. I think if a machine wakes up, we’re not going to understand why any more than we understand why we woke up and can perceive the world as we do. I take the human baseline and expand upon it. They do think in ways we don’t understand, because we don’t know how they got there.
I really don’t like the assumption that emotion and logic are opposing forces that are incompatible with each other, where you have androids that cannot do emotions and have a binary code approach to the universe. You often get stories about how a robot begins to feel things and they’re not able to handle it. I feel like that’s so wrong. We have both. We have logic and emotion, and they serve different purposes. They’re both important. Emotion does not taint logic, and logic does not cut you off to the ability to feel things. They’re two sides of the same coin, an intrinsic part of being aware.
Your work so often uses alien species to examine other ways of being human. There’s a species in the Wayfarers series, for instance, where child- rearing is a specific job, and once you have your child, you turn the baby over to the child-rearers. How do you use aliens to illuminate different ways we could think about being human?
One of the great strengths of science fiction is we’re never actually talking about the alien or the other. We’re never talking about the future, either. We’re talking about ourselves, and we’re talking about right now. Going into a science fiction story is a radically vulnerable act because you’re opening yourself up to whatever it is that the writer thinks about how the world works. “I’m going to leave everything else behind. Show me a world that works differently.” You can’t help but bring along baggage, but you do turn yourself into a bit of a blank slate when you walk into sci-fi.
It’s somewhat like traveling to a different country or learning a different language. Any sort of cultural exchange in the real world shifts your perspective on your self. If you start reading about families with different structures and different notions of parenthood in a sci-fi story, it inevitably makes you think about your own ideas about what those things are, your own template of how the world works. And that’s true regardless of whether you look at it and go, “Ooh, that’s cool,” or if you go, “That makes me really uncomfortable.”
In fact, those moments of discomfort can be really valuable! I personally like to look at those moments where I go, “Yuck!” Then I look at where that is coming from. Is that coming from a cultural taboo or a physical difference? Is that knee-jerk thing I’m feeling good or not? There is something very reflective about engaging with things outside of yourself. That makes sci-fi an incredibly valuable tool for being able to pick apart your own biases.
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Elena Di Vincenzo/Archivio Elena Di Vincenzo/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images
There’s a real trend lately toward escapism and positive stories. I don’t want to judge people for that, but darker stuff tends to scratch my itch. You write really positive stories, though, and I love your work. And I think the thing you do is you write positive stories in worlds where reality is still full of darkness and hard things. And yet the beings in your books are kind to each other, and that feels beautiful amid the darkness and hardship. How do you think about balancing those two tones?
I always preface this by saying: I think that dark is important. Sad stories, tragedies — it’s important that we tell those, both because it’s a matter of personal choice what sort of story you feel like engaging with on a particular day but also because we need cautionary tales. We need to be able to work through our own trauma and our own pain, and sometimes, the best way to do that is just to confront it head-on.
But if the only sorts of futures you tell stories about are dark or scary or dystopian, it can start to breed nihilism after a while. It makes you afraid of the future. Hopeful futures need to exist as a counterpoint. So a big part of why I write is to be the other side of the scale.
In terms of how to balance it within a story itself, it’s important to note that hope doesn’t mean that there’s a happy ending, necessarily, or that everything works out fine. Hope is something you foster in your darkest moments. Hope cannot exist without pain, without trauma, without scary stuff. It’s the act of believing there is something better on the other side of this. Even though I embrace kindness and compassion and cooperation in my stories, bad stuff still happens, because bad stuff happens in the world. The only way you can really talk about hope is to show the bad stuff happening. But then you show what comes after: people healing, people helping each other.
To me, that is more comforting than when everything is sugar-coated, when everything works and everything’s great. We do need escapist comfort food from time to time. But the most comforting stories for me are ones in which something went wrong, but things got better. People got through it not just through their own strength but because of the people propping them up.
Yeah, early in the pandemic last year, this study got passed around that said, contrary to so much post- apocalyptic storytelling, in a crisis, humans help each other. In the wasteland, there would be terrible sociopaths, but the people who survived would most likely band together in small communities. In most of your books, humans made the planet uninhabitable for themselves, but then they figured out a way to keep going. Then the people who kept going built these new social mores around cooperation.
So tell me, Becky Chambers: Do you think the world is doomed, but humanity might be able to pull through?
I don’t think the world is doomed, but we’re in a precarious place right now. We are a social, cooperative species. In 2020, we all had to be alone, yet we found ways to help each other anyway. We need each other. There is no survival for us if we don’t lean on each other.
If we’re going to survive and make sure we’re living in an ecosystem that can support us, the only way forward is to get past the idea that we’re all in it alone. The only way we are going to overcome the challenges we face on a global scale is if we swallow some humble pie and say, “I’m not the main character of this story. I am one of billions of side characters, and there is no main character. All we can do is help each other.” I do not see a future for humanity where we haven’t learned that lesson.
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Mario came down the wrong pipe
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I mean they do not know it yet.
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If She Stayed In Italy To Raise The Child, He Would Also Provide Child Support Until The Child Turned 18. She agreed, but asked how he would know when the baby was born. To keep it discrete, he told her to simply mail him a post card, and write ‘Spaghetti’ on the back. He would then arrange for the child support payments to begin.
One day, about 9 months later, he came home to his confused wife. ‘Honey’, she said, ‘you received a very strange post card today’.
‘Oh, really? Let me see…’, he said. The wife gave it to him and watched as her husband read the card, turned white, and fainted. On the card was written: ‘Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti. Two with meatballs, one without. Send extra sauce.’
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predditor
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The Rock always beats scissors.
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