Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So there's speculative fiction and there's science fiction.

And there's science fiction fantasy and there's fantasy.

And you might put them all under a big umbrella

called wonder tales.

So wonder tales are not naturalist.

They're not the world that we find ourselves in here

They're not the world that we find ourselves in here

and now today.

Speculative fiction is a way of dealing with possibilities

that are inherent in our society now,

but which have not yet been fully enacted.

You can look at books like "Brave New World," Zamyatin's

"We," and "1984," things for which we've

got the technology more or less, and arranged

got the technology more or less, and arranged

in a space on the planet we happen to be living on.

Science fiction, usually we think

of other galaxies, other planets, other sorts of things

entirely.

And I write speculative fiction not

because I don't like the other kind,

but because I can't write it.

It's not within my skill set.

It's not within my skill set.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you're interested in writing speculative fiction or even

science fiction, look around you at what's

happening in the world.

Read some newspapers.

Often the back pages of the newspapers, or even

a magazine like "New Scientist" or "Scientific American"

a magazine like "New Scientist" or "Scientific American"

will open the doors to some of the things

that people are working on right now,

but may not have succeeded in doing yet.

But it does show what they're interested in achieving.

And you can take that idea, and just move it

a little further down the road.

My mother, I found, when going through her effects

after she had died, had saved two whole newspapers.

She saved the whole newspaper about the moon landing,

She saved the whole newspaper about the moon landing,

and she saved a newspaper about a report made

by the Club of Rome in 1972.

And what the Club of Rome was saying

in 1972 was if we don't mend our ways in relationship

to the environment, by the year 2010,

things are going to be like this.

And we didn't, and they are.

And we didn't, and they are.

Unfortunately, human beings are quite short-term thinkers,

and especially politicians are short-term thinkers.

So had I been writing a spec fic about social media,

it would have been quite easy to predict that somebody

was going to steal all the data and use

it to manipulate elections.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Speculative fiction is fiction, and therefore, all the rules

Speculative fiction is fiction, and therefore, all the rules

that apply to writing fiction, including

making it interesting, making it plausible,

making it accurate to itself, all of those things

apply to it.

Just because it's speculative fiction does not mean

it's going to be automatically interesting.

There is a whole category of readers who won't read it.

They just say, I don't read that,

which is kind of silly of them, because there's

nothing about genre that means that a genre book is a bad book

nothing about genre that means that a genre book is a bad book

or that it's a good book.

It's a book, and it has to be good on its own terms, period.

So by saying, I don't read that, they're just

excluding a lot of pretty good books

from their reading experience.

If you're writing speculative fiction or science fiction,

you can't violate the rules that you yourself have set up,

you can't violate the rules that you yourself have set up,

or just to take it back to "Gulliver's Travels,"

one of the origins of this kind of writing,

if it's a society of horses and the horses are virtuous,

you can't show an evil horse.

If the horses are, by nature, virtuous,

they're incapable of these bad behaviors,

and you can't therefore show one doing those bad behaviors,

unless you're changing the story pretty radically.

unless you're changing the story pretty radically.

So if I say it is so that women aren't allowed to read,

I can't show them gaily reading books

in public, just for instance.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Are there some themes that are common to speculative fiction?

It depends whether the speculative fiction

is a utopia or a dystopia.

So in a utopia, you're portraying

So in a utopia, you're portraying

a world that is supposed to be better than the one we live in.

And in a dystopia, you're portraying

a world that is supposed to be worse than the one we live in.

So a single person alone on an island is not a dystopia.

Dystopias and utopias are all about societies,

or groups of people, either living better or living worse.

And it's also true that one person's utopia

And it's also true that one person's utopia

is going to be another person's dystopia.

So "Brave New World" is a case in point.

The people in "Brave New World" think

they're living a pretty good life, the character who

comes in from outside and looks at them

thinks they're degenerate and soulless.

So it depends who's looking, and it's also usually true

that within every utopia, there's

a little dystopia, quite frequently located in the past.

a little dystopia, quite frequently located in the past.

This was the horrible past.

This was the awful thing that we needed to fix.

Or it can be in a dystopia also located in the past.

This was the better world that has now been destroyed.

It's a yin yang arrangement.

If the world is worse, in comparison

with what is it worse?

If it's better, in comparison with what is it better?

If it's better, in comparison with what is it better?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The story of "Oryx and Crake" is that our hero,

whose name began by being Jimmy, but who

has renamed himself as Snowman, is living in a tree.

And around him in his vicinity are

living some bioengineered humanoids

living some bioengineered humanoids

who have been designed so that they don't have

the built-in human problems that have got us

into so much trouble.

So for example, they don't require clothing.

They've got built-in sunblock and insect repellent.

I would love that.

And so they don't need clothes.

And because they don't need clothes,

they don't need to grow any of the materials

from which clothing is made, or create any of those materials,

from which clothing is made, or create any of those materials,

or kill any animals to get their skins.

They don't need to do any of that.

They are vegetarian, so they don't kill any animals.

And not only are they vegetarian,

but they can eat leaves, like rabbits.

And therefore, they don't need to cultivate any crops.

They are egalitarian.

They have no interest in kings, leaders,

or any people of that kind.

They're peaceful.

They mate seasonally, like other mammals, but unlike us.

So there's never any no means no.

There's never any can't go out with you on Friday

because I'm washing my hair.

Nobody gets rejected.

And when it's not the season for mating,

nobody's interested in sex.

So they don't have marriage.

The children are the children of all.

The children are the children of all.

And when mating season approaches, parts of them

turn blue like parts of a lot of other mammals and creatures.

They go into mating plumage, as it were.

And mating is group mating, like that of cats.

So there isn't any patriarchy because nobody

knows who is their daddy.

knows who is their daddy.

So no property ownership.

Everything is shared.

And those are the people that Jimmy is living next to.

And as it turns out, he finds them pretty boring.

So then we get Jimmy's back story.

And that is the story of how these people were invented

and how our kind of human being then

had to be destroyed, because we know from looking at history,

had to be destroyed, because we know from looking at history,

particularly the history of colonialism,

what happens to peaceful, egalitarian types of people

when weapon-wielding, hierarchical other people

appear in their vicinity.

Usually they get slaughtered or enslaved.

So that's not going to happen to these people

because their creator has annihilated

because their creator has annihilated

most of our kind of humanity.

That's the sort of deep back story,

but the front story is how we follow Jimmy, Snowman,

in his day to day adventures.

And then what happens when some other human beings like

him show up, what will he do?

What inspired this book was rumination

What inspired this book was rumination

on extinction, which there is a lot going on right now.

And also, rumination on what gets people

into the kinds of problematic situations they so frequently

seem to find themselves in.

So how would you get rid of the characteristics

that we have that get us into these problems

that we have that get us into these problems

if you were bioengineering a new race of people?

I was asked to address a meeting of some geneticists.

And I was talking about my use of this in fiction.

And I gave them about seven examples

of new things that could be created.

And some of them actually already had been created.

Some of them exist now.

Some of them I had invented.

Some of them I had invented.

So I gave them this list, and then I said,

I made up four of those.

And they went, hurray--

[LAUGHS] --because they couldn't tell themselves.

For speculative fiction, for me, it

has to have its roots in things we can already do

or on the road to being able to do.

So the growing of human organs in pigs

had already started by the time I wrote "Oryx and Crake."

They had not quite succeeded, but now they have.

They had not quite succeeded, but now they have.