Building the Future, Step by Step with Ada Palmer

A conversation with Ada Palmer about building the future with humility, the process of creating a science fiction world, and many spoiler-heavy deep dives into the world of Terra Ignota.

Mentioned in this episode

Books and works. Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota — Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, Perhaps the Stars · Ada Palmer & Jo Walton, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy · Ada Palmer, And Loki in His Prison (forthcoming) · "Somebody Will" (song) · Bill Bryson, At Home · Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists · Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea · Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet · Boccaccio, Decameron.

People and places. Tyler Cowen · Teresa Nielsen Hayden · Johannes Gutenberg · Francis Bacon · Michelangelo · Villa I Tatti (Florence) · Worldcon · the Terra Ignota Discord.

Transcript

Ada: Stop telling stories about a thing as if one person did it. Tell the story of how a whole team of people did this. And when we look at the major innovations of the past, recognize their plural and often anonymous origins and shapers — and ask: will we be content if we end up being the anonymous contributor to future generations having this wonderful thing?

Introduction

[00:00:26]

Ben: Today I'm excited and grateful to share my conversation with Ada Palmer. Among many other things, Ada is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of several books, including the science fiction series Terra Ignota, which now lives rent-free in my head.

In the words of the inimitable Tyler Cowen, this is the conversation that I want to have — which means the vast majority of it is an extremely nerdy, extremely spoiler-heavy discussion of the Terra Ignota series. The spoiler warning comes around the one-hour mark, but rather than making you stop then, I'd recommend stopping right here, going and reading the entire series, and then coming back. We'll still be here.

A podcast about the unwritten workings of a fictional future is a vaguely legitimate segue to noting that I've brought Idea Machines back after a very long hiatus, for a fairly specific reason. I'm still going to dig into the people and systems that turn ideas into reality, but with a particular focus on knowledge and stories that are in people's heads and aren't yet written down or recorded anywhere. Even in the age of the internet and LLMs, there is so much that can only be discovered through conversation — and that, I think, should be the point of podcasts.

So with that, here's my conversation with Ada Palmer.

"Somebody Will," and making peace with not seeing the end

[00:01:57]

Ben: This is actually a very selfish question. Your song "Somebody Will" is one of my favorite songs.

Ada: I had to practice for six months before I could sing it without crying while singing it. It still requires great concentration.

Ben: I sometimes cry a little when I listen to it. If you're listening to this and you haven't heard the song, you should stop and listen to it, because it's amazing, and we will be here when you get back.

Okay — assuming everybody has now listened to the song. I think it captures the fact that ambitious projects take many lifetimes and the labor of many people who are only contributing indirectly, in a way that I feel nothing else does. And that fact feels very at odds with the cultural milieu today, where — at least for me — it feels like you personally need to be working on the thing, and if you can't get it done within your lifetime then you're a failure.

So how do you internalize that personally? I constantly feel this tension: I believe the message of "Somebody Will" is true, and at the same time I cannot feel satisfied with it. And how would you get more people to internalize it? I feel like the world would be better if more people did.

Ada: I have the advantage, as a historian, of being used to thinking on century and multi-century timeframes — of looking at how many of the things we celebrate or think of as important were multi-generational projects, and how few people, even among the ones we talk about as if one person achieved the thing, actually saw that achievement bear fruit, or even near-full fruit, within their lifetime.

Lately I've been asked about Gutenberg a lot. From Gutenberg's perspective: I invented the machine, I used the machine, the machine worked great, the sales didn't, I went bankrupt, and I died in poverty. In the later part of his life he got to see other people starting to build printing presses and trying to print — and also going bankrupt. The books were starting to circulate, and everyone was saying, "I don't know about these new weird books, they're different from the old ones." So if he judges himself on his lifetime achievement, he judges himself negatively. The ongoing effects of the Gutenberg revolution mostly happen well after his death, and after the deaths of his first generation of apprentices, in the mid-1500s and moving toward the 1600s — and there are stages of it still happening in the 1700s as it democratizes access to knowledge, which is something one could anticipate it would do, but not see.

So many of our best and biggest projects are like that. In fact, you very rarely have a project that comes to fruition within its beginner's lifetime. But it requires us to look at history to feel that.

Another factor is that we're so often pressured not just to look short term, but to look very short term. My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a brilliant editor, has a very apt saying that I think about a lot: we always overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but underestimate what we accomplish in five years. If you look at yourself and ask, "What did I do this year?" you'll always judge yourself harshly and be disappointed. But if you make the list of "What did I do in the last five years?" you'll say, "Oh, wow, I accomplished a lot" — even though each individual year felt like you didn't meet your own standards.

And another part of it is that yes, there is a melancholy to "Somebody Will." It's about a kind of surrendering acceptance: that you will not be there to enjoy the thing, that you are working on something so that others will enjoy it in the future. That requires remembering that the same is true of the people in the past who worked to give us what we enjoy — that there is a teamwork across the diaspora of time, in which we all have to love the future generations we are helping and accept that they will get benefits we will not. Because otherwise, what are we doing?

Ben: Let me poke at this one more time — and the answer might be that it's impossible. How do you get to serenity with the fact that we're working on a very long-term project that needs many people who are not going to be the person remembered for the thing, and that this is important and worthy? What actually goes on in your head?

Ada: Again, there is a mournful side to it. And we therefore need to encourage a culture that celebrates all the contributors. Stop telling stories about a thing as if one person did it. Tell the story of how a whole team of people did this. And when we look at the major innovations of the past, recognize their plural and often anonymous origins and shapers — and ask: will we be content if we end up being the anonymous contributor to future generations having this wonderful thing?

Because what matters to me isn't that I get thanked for X. What matters to me is that I helped make sure X happens. That separation of credit is important.

I remember thinking vividly about this after reading a book called At Home — by, I think, Thomas Madden, although I may have the name wrong [it's Bill Bryson] — which is a fun popular history about all the objects in your house and how they developed. The history of the table knife, and the chair, and the chest of drawers, and the kitchen; how houses were originally one room and came to be subdivided into multiple rooms, and what the front hall is. It's a really fun, light history, essentially a string of delightful anecdotes.

But I noticed that he would sometimes talk about the inventor of something we have — the inventor of the egg whisk or whatever — and then, if the inventor of this useful thing didn't end up rich and famous as a result, he described that as a tragedy. His definition of tragedy was: somebody contributed something that benefited the human race, and they didn't become rich and famous as a result; they lived an ordinary life as X, Y, or Z. Ordinary life was the tragic outcome.

I snagged on that. What are we doing if living the life that most people live, having also contributed to the sum total of human happiness, is your definition of tragedy? He had this very strong sense that it was an injustice for someone's name not to travel with their invention, and for someone not to become rich as a result of their invention. And it was such a narrow portrait of what it could mean to contribute to human thriving — one that assumes only the inventor contributes, and not the hundreds of thousands of people involved in the distribution and manufacture and improvement of the egg whisk, who also bring things that help our daily lives.

It felt so un-Baconian and unscientific. Bacon, when first arguing for the scientific method, says there is no greater act of charity and love than to do something that helps every human being after you live a better life. In its original articulation, that is its own reward. But the idea that it should be a ladder to fame and social rise, as opposed to something one achieves and is proud of — I think that's where we get snagged, and where we get these stresses. To contribute to humans reaching the stars is to contribute to humans reaching the stars. It is not to be the name that becomes famous.

Whose labor counts

[00:11:27]

Ben: It's an open question to me how you make more of a culture of that.

Ada: Part of it is that we have to start evaluating contributions more equally, because we have a really unfair way of thinking about labor, where some types are celebrated and high status and others are low status.

This goes way back. It's true in the Middle Ages: any job you do with your hands is low status, and any job that is intellectual work is high status. This is why Michelangelo's father was absolutely rabid against Michelangelo being a sculptor. They came from a banking family, and Michelangelo's father did intellectual work — banking — and it would be a shame upon the family for his son to work with his hands and be an artist.

The outcome of this over the course of the Renaissance, via things like Vasari's Lives of the Artists, is that they make the argument for art being intellectual labor — for an artist like Michelangelo to shift status from being thought of as manual labor, like a carpenter, to being thought of as intellectual labor, a peer of a doctor or a scholar. And we now consider art to be a high-status intellectual occupation.

But we still have these horrible terms like "unskilled labor." Go watch anybody doing so-called unskilled labor for an hour and you think: holy moly, this person is really good at this. The speed and the elegance with which they have optimized this set of skills is incredible.

It takes many kinds of labor to do something. But at an academic institute, we do not celebrate the people maintaining the site or preparing the food in the kitchen as contributors to the thing — even though it's absolutely essential, and without it the thing can't happen. That is a terrible problem. And more and more I see people talking about the world as if only a tiny elite are serious contributors and everyone else is just a dot moving around. An NPC.

I was being interviewed about the singularity — this idea of trying to maximize the computing power that Earth produces in order to speed up how quickly we create an AI god. The interviewer asked what one thing would contribute most to maximizing Earth's computing power. And I said: well, obviously it would be UBI, or another way of solving poverty. Because right now the majority of computing power on Earth is human brain cells, which vastly outnumber the computational power of computers. And a large share of that computing power belongs to people living in poverty, whose capacity is being diminished and sidelined onto worrying about where tomorrow's meal is going to come from.

When you provide a safety net at a reasonable standard of living, so that people don't have the anxiety that poverty causes, people become way more creative and generative, and start new businesses. All of our UBI experiments show outpourings of art, discovery, entrepreneurship, increased generation — all of which contribute, second order, to Earth advancing. And the crowd who thinks about this was just blown away by thinking of, A, the human brain as computing power, and B, poverty as the largest drain upon the computational powers of the Earth.

Ben: People don't think about second-order effects enough, period.

Ada: There is no symphony hall without its janitor. There is no symphony hall without the workman in addition to the architect. And we celebrate one of these arbitrarily and not the others. Why is that? Is it because the construction worker is doing something athletic and manual? Well, we celebrate sports people, and they're doing something athletic and manual. It's a totally cultural construction, which of these occupations are celebrated and which are not.

Ben: So we just need to celebrate everybody.

Ada: Celebrate ninety percent of the occupations — and identify the ten percent where it's actually, this is a waste of a human being.

Ben: This is a waste of a human being, and we should not have a human being doing this. That's where we bring in a robot.

Ada: Right. But there's all this discussion of "let's have the robots replace everything everyone is doing." No — when human beings are doing things that are stimulating and creative and make them happy, leave it alone. But if we have a robot that cleans out the gutters, that would be great, because nobody is stimulated by cleaning out gutters.

Ben: Or does boring paperwork.

Ada: Oh, that's the dream.

Where the Hives came from: a lunch table in Florence

[00:16:44]

Ben: Shifting toward Terra Ignota — but not yet to the spoilers. You spent a lot of time in Italy. How did that affect the creation of the Terra Ignota world?

Ada: A lot, specifically via Villa I Tatti, an institute owned and run by Harvard but quite independent, in the outskirts of Florence. It's not on the hill where the Decameron takes place; it's on the hill next to the hill where the Decameron takes place — to anchor it in literary geography.

It has fellowships, so scholars from all over the world come there, about two dozen a year, for a year-long residency. And one graduate student at a time. I was the graduate student. You're sort of there as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed mascot.

Ben: So it's a bunch of senior scholars and you?

Ada: A lot of them are postdocs — they're starting their careers, they've finished their PhDs recently. There are usually two or three senior scholars resident, and then two dozen who are at the next stage from where you as a PhD student are, and from whom you can learn exciting stuff. Some are later career. And they're from all over the place — and they've usually gone all over the place, on similar postdocs and for research.

I remember vividly being at a group lunch. There was a married couple there having a conversation with a couple of other people. The mom was Australian and the dad was Spanish. They had two kids, one of whom had been born in the US and another in the UK. They'd lived in France while the kids were little, and now the kids were medium-sized and in Italy, attending a polyglot school.

And the parents were discussing the different citizenships the two kids were eligible for, and the benefits and drawbacks of each. "You get this with a UK citizenship, but you can't have that. You can have UK and then US, but you can't have US and then UK. These benefits versus those benefits. And if the kids have two different citizenships, is that bad for them relative to each other? Does it make them feel envious, or unspecial, or special compared to their sibling?"

It was such a buyer's-market conversation about citizenship. They were strategically sitting down and asking: which ones do we want to apply for, which ones do they already have, what are the utilities of each one, how do we feel about the governments and the values that they advance?

And it made me think: what if everybody had that conversation? What if it were normal, when you're coming of age, to sit down, think about all the citizenships in the world, decide which ones you think are best, and choose — rather than having it fall upon you by accident of birth?

It made sense to me using the EU, where people have free movement, as the model. When you're in the EU, you may have been born in France, but your family is Polish and you feel Polish because you grew up with them and visited family and learned the language — or you don't, and you feel French, and that's up to you. That freedom of movement, where who you are isn't where you live, it's what group you identify with, felt so plausible for a future in which technology means mobility is getting faster and more natural, and we choose jobs and homes based on location rather than being limited by geography.

Plotters, pantsers, and the tyranny of past you

[00:20:42]

Ben: I don't know that I've ever heard you talk about your writing process in any detail. Fiction writers — some are plotters, some are pantsers, some are in between. Where do you fall?

Ada: I have an essay on Tor.com arguing that the difference is less binary than it feels. For those listening who don't know the definitions: a plotter is somebody who plans ahead, outlines, has a whole plan for the story before they start writing it. A pantser is somebody who plunges in and figures out the story, or the characters, or the details, as they're writing.

Here's my argument that these are less different than they sound. If you're a plotter, you're spending extra time planning at the beginning — making your outline, revising your outline, thinking about order and structure, rereading the outline, getting a sense of how it flows and fixing that. Then you implement it, and you do comparatively less revision at the end. Whereas a pantser will plunge into writing six months earlier, figure out those structure questions as they go, get to the end, and then often do more revision — doing to the manuscript the revisions that the plotter would do to the outline. So you're doing the same steps, you're just doing them in a different order.

Everybody still does the "hmm, let's think about the pacing; this character has too many chapters where they appear all together and then they don't appear for a long time; I have to think about the balance of that." Everybody does that step. But do you do it before you write the first draft or after? That's the real difference. And you can have a very meticulous story where you figured it out as you went and then went back and put things in earlier to make it all work.

I am at the far extreme end of planner. I world-build for at least five years, and then I spend six months doing the outline before I sit down to write the first sentence. I outlined the entire series — chapter by chapter, all four books — and had a complete plan for the whole thing before I wrote the first sentence of the first chapter of the first book.

I then followed that outline incredibly precisely. Often when I'm writing I'll get to a point and think, maybe this bit of the outline is wrong, maybe I should do this other thing instead. And I'll start doing the other thing, and work on it, and get more and more frustrated, and wonder why it's going wrong, and whine to my bash'mates about it. And then I'll go back to the outline and realize: oh, of course. Past me is always correct. And I repent of having strayed from the outline.

Because past me was in the middle of six months of being zoomed out, looking at the whole structure, really understanding everything being set up short term and long term. Whereas present me, in the middle of writing something, is very immersed in that one chapter and its valences and its emotion, and can lose sight of the work it's doing to continue things from five chapters ago and set things up for five chapters later. I was fully aware of all that when I did the outline, and I might be less aware of it in the act of writing. Which is why the version of me that was outlining is always more correct about what the chapter needs than the version of me sitting down to write the chapter. That's what the outline is for.

Five years of worldbuilding, mechanically

[00:24:18]

Ben: What do you actually do, mechanically, for the five years of worldbuilding? What does that entail?

Ada: A lot of it is that I'll have a notion. I'll be sitting at that table at Villa I Tatti listening to the conversation and think, wouldn't that be neat — that would be a really cool thing to explore in a story.

I will then take the worlds I'm building, because I'm always building several at once, for several successive series. I'm currently doing the worldbuilding for the series after the series after the series of which the first book comes out next summer.

Ben: That's so cool.

Ada: I've already fully done the worldbuilding for this series and the series after it, and I'm worldbuilding the series after that, and a couple of others. They're sort of on a conveyor belt: the most assembled, the medium assembled, and the less assembled, as they move forward.

I'll take the notion and go to my most assembled world, the one I intend to do soonest, and ask: does this notion fit? Does it combine well with the other stuff I already have in this world? Do they synergize? Are they compatible with each other? And if they are, I'll plop that new idea into the world.

So I'll be working on a world where the key ideas are the flying car network, and voluntary citizenship, and a kid who can bring toys to life with a touch, and a revival of eighteenth-century ideas about gender. And then I'll independently get the notion of somebody being a professional living doll. And I'll ask: could that happen in that world? Yes, it could. What would that mean? Well, celebrity culture in a global world would have neat characteristics; the stuff I'm doing with gender would intersect with it in nifty ways. Neat. That notion, totally independent when I came up with it, can live in that world.

Or I might have another idea, look at it in that world, and say: you know what, this isn't compatible with this world. The society of Terra Ignota — it doesn't fit. I'm going to take this idea and move on to the next world. And the first world it can go in is where that idea then lives.

So worlds accumulate multiple different seeds. You'll notice that it's not that the living doll is derived from the other stuff — it's an independent idea. But once put in, the two connect to each other, the way trees in a forest develop shunts that send sugar to each other and keep each other alive and support the entire forest ecosystem, even though they began as individual and indeed competitive trees. The whole world develops from multiple different central seeds.

Ben: Sorry, I'm very interested in the details of this. Are you writing these down on index cards?

Ada: A lot of it will just be in my head. I also use OneNote, where I'll jot things down. There will be notes in OneNote that are sometimes a whole table with a chronology that develops over time, but also just a list of words I found evocative, or a reminder note to myself. I also email myself ideas so that I remember them, and there they are, searchably, in my email. I also sometimes write them on Post-it notes and leave them around the house.

Sometimes something came to me and felt evocative from a picture — a work of art, or a postcard, or an image.

Ben: You have your mood board.

Ada: I'll put those by my bed, or in other places, and they'll make me chew on those ideas over time.

But the majority of this will be in my head. Nobody could reconstruct the world from those notes. The notes are chaos, until I get to the late pre-outlining stage. I was probably working on the Terra Ignota world for four years before I started writing down the chronology.

I do have a long timeline of events, from the present to the completion of the terraforming of Mars, with the dates of when everybody was born, when different cultural movements happened, when this or that historical war that's mentioned began and ended, and so on — a long, color-coded timeline. I'll probably share it at some point, but it's in OneNote, which is hard to export.

I also have a custom Google Map which shows the Hive majorities in every major city on the globe, so you can see the distribution of the population. One thing I did deep into the worldbuild, preparing to think through the latter half of the series, was go through all the cities with a population above — I think it's ten million — that exist on Earth now, to figure out the future of each one, and then create several new cities that would be above that threshold by then. Making sure I wasn't skipping any cities. That I did Africa. That I did the Pacific Rim. That I had a global plan for this and not a non-global one.

OneNote lets you combine text and note-taking with images, so for example there's one page that is a map of ancient Rome with my own notes on what is in each building in the reconstructed version of Rome in Romanova, where so many events take place. So the note-taking is extensive, but chaotic in my case.

Ben: That is incredibly cool. I feel like there's a through-line in great artists and makers of things, where the thing that you see is the tippy-tip of an iceberg.

Ada: It has to feel like that — especially for a built world. It has to feel real, it has to feel deep, it has to feel like it has all those things.

Big beats, connective tissue, and the management of mood

[00:30:35]

Ada: Another thing about outlining, briefly. A word I've known a number of authors to use, that I kind of use too: when you're developing the story, there will often be a point at which you know what the big beats of the story are.

Let's imagine we're outlining Romeo and Juliet. A big beat is when they meet. A big beat is when they get together. Then there's a sort of midpoint crisis, when the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt result in crisis and Romeo has to be kicked out. And then there's the dramatic ending in which they die.

And then you ask: okay, what other stuff do I want in this story? Well, I need to develop the characters of Mercutio and Tybalt, and that has to happen before the midpoint. And I need some comedy scenes — this is Shakespeare — so I need to put those in at some point.

So you can imagine Shakespeare saying: I know what the big beats are. Where am I going to fit the Mercutio characterization scene? Should it be right before his death, or earlier, so that we're invested in his character for a while? I want a comedy scene between this sad major serious beat and this sad major serious beat, to vary the mood. Who can be in that scene? I need a lighter scene between Romeo and Juliet meeting and Romeo and Juliet getting together — what can I put there that will change the mood, so we don't have two passionate romantic sequences in a row?

So you figure out the big beats, and then you figure out the in-between connective tissue. And sometimes you'll be aware that there must be a speech: I have this idea for Mercutio making this passionate, weird speech about Queen Mab, it's a lot of fun, where do I put it? There's some flexibility — it can be at any point before his death. It can be early, it could be at the beginning, it could be just before his death. How does the audience — or in my case the reader — feel about Mercutio's death differently if we've just come to love him right before, versus if we came to love him really early on and we like him almost more than Romeo because he had more character for half the play before this crisis comes?

Many technically-pantser authors I know have figured out the big beats before they start, and then are filling in and improvising the in-between stuff, and might move it around at the end. So if Shakespeare were a pantser, he might have been writing along, and then: Mercutio's dying soon, I get to give him a speech — oh, this speech is so awesome, I want to move it earlier. And he'd move the Queen Mab speech from right before his death to substantially earlier, so that we care about this character for a longer period of time.

That's exactly the kind of revision that a pantser does, and that I would do at the outline level, where I have everything on screen in front of me and I'm thinking: these three Mercutio scenes are really all in a cluster. Do I want that? Do I want a character who gets introduced and then, the moment we love them, they're gone? Or do I want to stretch this out, so this is a character with whom we have a longer emotional relationship?

So that's core to the outlining process. We have these big beats. At some point we need to meet Saladin — when do we meet Saladin? Is it before or after the revelation of what Mycroft really did? How does it feel if it's before? How does it feel if it's after? Let's settle that.

Because many things that happen in a story are not causally related. Some are: Romeo committing murder has to be before the Romeo banishment scene; those can't be reversed, because one causes the other. The "Juliet is sad because Romeo has been banished" scene follows from those. Those have to be in an order. But Romeo meeting Juliet versus the Queen Mab speech — those can be reversed. They aren't causally related. They're independent, except inasmuch as they both have to be early. And then the author gets to think through which is first and which is second, and what the effects of that are.

So a lot of the outlining process is putting in the big beats, figuring out what has to be before and what has to be after, and what can go at any point, and then situating it in the right place — and also realizing when mood needs to alternate.

One principle of reading is that we notice changes in mood and tension much more than we notice the absolute level. If you write a book with five super-high-stakes action chapters in a row, the reader gets tired of super-high-stakes action. It all feels homogeneous. It doesn't feel exciting anymore. The beginning will feel exciting, but it will then flatline experientially.

Whereas if you have a high-paced action sequence, and then a low-mood piece where people are relaxing and something silly happens, or we cut away to the cooks preparing the banquet who are not at all invested in the action that's going on — then when we return to that high-stakes thing, it feels high-stakes again.

You need to alternate sad with happy. You need to alternate tense with relaxed. You need to alternate fast-paced with slow-paced, so that people feel all of them more, compared to having a homogeneous mood.

So sometimes I'll be going along and think: we've just had three or four chapters in a row where Mycroft, our narrator, is freaking the heck out and overwhelmed and in despair. We need a nice, calm Martin Guildbreaker chapter here, where he's patiently investigating something and explaining his investigation, because that will let us escape the mood — so that when we return to it, the grief being experienced by our narrator is vivid and exciting again, because we had a break.

And also so that the complexity of trying to understand what the hell this narrator is actually saying is enjoyable again, in a puzzle-box way. If you do a puzzle box, you want to then coast and not do a puzzle box next — have something as a break, and then do the next puzzle box. I don't want to give you nothing but puzzle-box chapters in a row. I'm also going to give you a nice linear fidget-toy chapter, where you're enjoying manipulating the thing but there's not a puzzle challenge goal.

Ben: Noticing the change in mood rather than the mood itself — I see that across many areas of how people notice things. People notice a thing changing more than the absolute level.

Ada: You notice color in places where there is very little color. You notice beauty in places where there's very little beauty.

Ben: Or changes in prices. People don't go around thinking "ah yes, this is expensive" all the time while the price stays the same. But all of a sudden a price changes and people react.

Ada: Exactly. We very much operate logarithmically, and notice the change — the integral rather than the absolute amount, or the absolute speed at which something's moving.

Designing the Hives

[00:38:20]

Ben: Related to worldbuilding — and if you've talked about this somewhere and I missed it, I apologize — how did you come up with the Hives in the first place? They feel so specific.

Ada: When I had this idea at Villa I Tatti of "what if you choose your citizenship," I was thinking about it as deriving from transit — transit becoming easy.

And then I thought: okay, what kinds of organizations would these be? If transit is suddenly really easy, if you can go anywhere on Earth in two hours, people are not going to want to put up with the frustrating, slow passport system. They're going to want that streamlined.

I was thinking about the Global Entry program. This is a thing you sign up for, and it vets you, and it's trusted, and it's a third party but semi-governmental and semi-not, and it facilitates you being able to go much faster through the border. What if one of those became even more so, so that when you're a member you really can skip everything and zip around the Earth really easily?

Well, if one of those developed, competitors would develop. What other kinds of focuses might a transit thing have? One of the things people would want to travel for is sports matches — people already do that. So there would be something whose whole shtick is: do you want to go see that game on another continent? We will facilitate that so it's easy.

I also thought about CouchSurfing, which — I think people do it less now — but you sign up to say "I've got a couch," and others sign up to say "I'm traveling to a place," and the thing itself facilitates being friendly, and there's trusted-person vetting.

And that idea became the Cousins: the idea of having a cousin in that town, who you may never actually have met, but they're not going to be too weird, because they're your cousin. You have this slight bridge of trust. So what if there was a company that stepped in to capitalize on what CouchSurfing is, but make it more formal, and called itself the Cousins network, and its motto was "what if you had a cousin in every town — we will hook that up"? I could see that company having started out more like CouchSurfing, where it's about where you're staying, and then branching into facilitating your ticket.

And then Gordian being the one that really was just like Global Entry — a simple profit-seeking company that would do this.

And then when the moment of the Great Renunciation comes — this is all background to the book, of course — these suddenly become political associations, when they had just been memberships. The way you might have a membership in Costco. The European Union is already this.

But if people have a membership in Costco, often that means they have certain values, as well as desiring to buy cheap bulk things. So you could imagine that if suddenly there were a major global crisis, and Costco said, "Okay, everybody who has a Costco membership — we kind of trust you, and we believe you share our values of paying people a living wage and making sure things flow. Do you want to transition to being a politically active group?" And everybody who has a Costco membership would say, "Well, actually, yeah. In fact, it does make sense at this weird juncture in human history to transition my Costco membership into being part of a political association that's in favor of a living wage and making sure people eat."

And you could see Costco transforming itself in a real crisis into a big series of pop-up mutual aid and new community kitchen things. That could totally happen.

Ben: They already make a lot of hot dogs.

Ada: The infrastructure is there, and the number of people with a connection to this thing is there. So it's the sort of thing that in the moment of the Great Renunciation could do that. And I imagined lots of other Hives being born like that.

And then I asked: what new ones would be born, when suddenly this is political? Well, one of them would be the Masons — because there's always this sort of "oh no, I'm not in any of these groups, I feel left out," among the large slice of the population that feels drawn to strength and claims of tradition and claims of strong authority. And here are all of these legends about this being that. So if somebody cunning steps in and mobilizes it, they could make the Masons be born at that moment.

And meanwhile, science fiction nerds are really well connected with each other. We all have community groups that organize Worldcon and all of this, and authors who can speak up and say, "Hey, all my fans — this thing, it's time to act." So it was plausible to me that Utopia could form very quickly in that moment of crisis as well.

So part of it was: what groups and corporations and things that already exist could do this?

And I remember wanting a really corporate one — this is the Mitsubishi in the end. What kinds of things last over time? The obvious choice would have been to be like Google or something. But when you look over time at corporations that really last multiple centuries, they tend to do very plural things. They tend to be consortia of multiple corporations rather than one. And they tend to be defined around a market or a world ethic rather than a product.

Look at IBM, which has not become one of the giant Earth-owning corporations, but has sure steadily existed and never had a crisis. A big part of that is that IBM defines itself as: we make products for corporations. Whatever new thing needs to be made for corporations, we will start making that. If people develop a completely unprecedented new technology, that is what we will do, and we will orient it around having an established, clear relationship with corporations.

So even if the computer ceased to matter economically tomorrow because it was replaced by the genetically modified super-eggplant, they would transition into corporate-focused genetically modified super-eggplants. And they would make that transition fine, in a way that Apple — which defines itself as an electronics company — would have struggled with at the time. Though Apple now is also a media and entertainment company, which is broader.

So the Mitsubishi Group, which is not one corporation but dozens and dozens of corporations that make a wide variety of things and are a consortium with each other, is a corporate structure that's likely to withstand multiple multi-decade, multi-century tech tumults and still be coherent. That's why I picked that.

Ben: Were there any Hive ideas that got the chopping block? Any that almost made it in?

Ada: None got the complete chopping block, because of course one of the structures of this is that there have been fewer over time and they've merged. So the other ideas are the ones that are mentioned briefly as existing — like OBP, which stands for One Big Party.

Ben: Which merged with the Humanists.

Ada: They merged with the Humanists. But that was globe-trotting so that you could go to concerts and parties and get-togethers, rather than sports matches. There's enough overlap between those ideas — because you're traveling to enjoy an event — that it makes sense those two could merge, with a focus on both sports and art, concerts and performances: a focus on wanting to go enjoy and behold a human being doing something excellent. So you could see how they'd share a compatible ethic.

Similarly Greenpeace, merging later with the Mitsubishi — but not fully yet. Would there be a group that would form centered on environmental custodianship, and wanting to take care not of people but of baby elephants? What would that be like? What countries would it have — not just a bunch of enthusiastic members, as it would anywhere, but massive, systemic, big cultural buy-in as opposed to small cultural buy-in? In the same way that sports fandom is bigger in some countries than others, or science fiction fandom is bigger in some countries than others even though it's present everywhere, personal investment in land and the value of land and land custodianship varies a lot.

I was interviewing friends from all over the place, and it sounded, from talking with them, like India was the place where people had a very strong cultural investment in land. One interesting quality of India in the international world is that people in India are much more reluctant to sell land to a foreign owner than in most cultures. There is lots of land in India owned by corporations, but they're Indian corporations much more so. And people are likely to turn down a foreign buyer making an offer on property — whether it's large-scale property or even just a house or a bungalow — because of this sense that India's land should belong to India's people, which is stronger than in many other cultures.

And this isn't a "we don't want foreigners dwelling here." We'll happily rent to a foreigner. It's the idea that the land should stay in the hands. I thought that would be an interesting place for Greenpeace's big nest of power to be centered, as it values land and land custodianship.

And then I was thinking through: in this global future, who inherits all the national parks? If the nation-states are giving way to successor states, do the national parks dissolve, or does one of these say, "We're going to be the one" — and have what become global parks, and a huge portion of the unpopulated world in their ownership and custodianship?

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The fandom, and the people who stop after book one

[00:49:24]

Ben: Last unspoiled question. How do you feel about the Terra Ignota fandom?

Ada: It's great. I've never had anything but the most positive interactions with readers, and I love discussing the big meaty questions. A story that is as big and meaty as this one means really thoughtful, interested, eager people who want to chew on ideas.

Ben: It feels like it's really touched something in the zeitgeist that even other good science fiction has not.

Ada: I think it holds up an example of a future worth having and worth living in, with lots of exciting things one can push for. And a future of strong and respect-worthy values.

One of the things about Terra Ignota is that, with very few exceptions, all the characters are philosophically self-examined and noble and have good ideals — ideals worth fighting for. And even though people come into strong conflict with each other, you respect and love both sides, because these are great people and they're fighting for great things.

Ben: It's not a "there's a bad guy," which is so common.

Ada: It's a neat vision of the future: what if everybody, even the people we fiercely disagreed with, was awesome, and we were disagreeing about important implementation or values — but underneath that, everybody was great?

What if we have this high portrait of what humanity is and could become? Because one metric of progress is how rich we are, and another is how long we live. But what if another metric of progress is how excellent our conflicts are — so that we only have conflicts when it's about some really important, worthwhile cause? We don't have conflicts about grievance, or oil, or profit, or moral panic. We have conflicts about important philosophic principles and fundamentals. Wouldn't that, even though there's still conflict, be a form of progress?

Ben: Peace is one form of progress, but moving to "this is a war worth fighting" is another form of progress. That's fascinating.

Ada: And "I respect my enemy" is a form of progress.

I love when Terra Ignota readers embrace and really want to live by some of these principles. I do sometimes feel like we could organize into a political advocacy group and crowdfund a lobbyist who advanced the values of this.

Ben: Let's do it. I think that would be really cool.

Ada: I would love to see it happen, because there are very important values in it — including the "what if we love the future and work for the future, but aren't vain about it, and do so with humility?"

Now, one thing I sometimes run across—

Ben: No, say what you were going to say first.

Ada: No, I want to hear yours. I'll say what I was going to say anyway.

Ben: Okay. The thing that also almost surprised me is how it really has something for everybody — there's a Hive that everyone feels kinship with. The obvious opposite would be Harry Potter, where of course you want to be in Gryffindor; Gryffindor is awesome, maybe Ravenclaw, but everybody else is kind of meh.

When I interact with other people who love Terra Ignota — I'm a Utopian, and at first I assumed everybody else who likes this is going to be a Utopian. But no. I've run into people who identify with every Hive.

Ada: And also sometimes people who say they would be a Graylaw, or who say "my religious identity is so core to me, I think I'd live in a reservation." I do run into that as well. And — great, there's space for you in this cool world. The world needs to respect you too, and have room in it for that, and needs that population, and needs to interface with them more as the narrative unfolds.

I worked hard for there to be breadth. And I worked hard to think through: if these Hives were the Hives that formed from other Hives merging with each other, if there used to be dozens and now there are seven—

Ben: What's the spanning set?

Ada: Exactly. And what bigger and bigger ideas came together under umbrellas?

Ben: Okay — what was the thing you were going to say?

Ada: I sometimes run into people who say, "Oh, I'm a big fan of Too Like the Lightning," and who haven't read further. It's a little perplexing to people who are completionists and read the whole thing, but there's a not insignificant swath of people who read book one and haven't read the rest, who are very excited by the glimpse it shows of this future, but didn't continue on to see the way it then critiques the imperfections in this future — and shows the future recognizing its own problems and critiquing itself and becoming dynamic, and by the end being on the path to incremental improvement.

I find it interesting talking with people like that, a lot of whom are Silicon Valley people.

When you're an author, one thing that's the case is that you can log into Amazon and it'll show you this little map of America with how many copies of your book have sold in each region. So I know how many copies of Terra Ignota have been bought in New York City versus Arkansas versus elsewhere. For practically all books, the largest sales are New York City — New York City is very big, very populous, and they read a lot of books — and usually Silicon Valley is second. With Terra Ignota it's the other way around.

So it is disproportionately popular among a world of people who see their technology transforming our lives and want an apparatus for thinking about what its future will be — one that is not just yet another cautionary tale about how the thing they're making could be used by a dystopia to make the world worse, but also how it could be used by a positive future to make the world better. I love that it's popular there, and I love talking to tech people who are eager to talk to me about it.

But every so often I'll get this chilling thing, where one of the things in the world-build that for me is definitely negative and should be raising your alarm bells, they will have seen as positive.

Ben: I'm sure you know the meme: "Ah yes, we have built the Torture Nexus from the book, Do Not Build The Torture Nexus."

Ada: Yes. With its much-needed sequel, No, I Meant Don't Build the Torture Nexus.

I had a conversation not long ago with a person who said they loved how Terra Ignota was basically a world without crime — an interesting thing for them to observe, because of course we know that's not the case—

Ben: That's not the case, and that's not the mechanism by which it's not the case.

Ada: And this was, in their reading, because of the trackers and universal surveillance: that it was an exploration of how universal surveillance could be great and could cause the end of crime.

And I said: well, firstly, there is crime. But secondly, the reason the universal surveillance isn't that bad in Terra Ignota is that the governments are so good — because the buyer's market for citizenship holds governments to great degrees of accountability. If they misused this data, there would be public outcry, and then a mass movement against the government that did it, as citizens switched to other Hives. That accountability means that when the data is misused — as indeed it is, as we see over the course of book two — there is a consequence, speedily, for that misuse. The governments, being accountable, cannot abuse it.

And the person just looked really sad. Because clearly, to this person who worked for a surveillance tech company, this was a hope that a surveillance tech future could be good, not bad. They hadn't thought through that it's the political change and the levels of political accountability that make it plausible that in such a future, surveillance tech would not do the harm it can do in a future where governments have a lot of power and not a lot of accountability.

So I always find it interesting to see people who see a particular thing they're looking for in a future in Terra Ignota — at least in book one — and then didn't follow that journey forward to be challenged by it.

But I love the people who read all of the books and followed me through the journey of: what if we have this future, and it's a great future, but it's not a perfect future, and it recognizes that, and it has to go through growing pains and work to become even better?

Because one of the things about a utopia in the classic sense is that it's static. It's achieved this perfect state and it's unchanging. A book that is a true classic utopia basically feels like you have arrived in the city and they say, "Hello, stranger! Would you like to learn about our perfect public transit system? Now would you like to learn about our perfect public education system?" Welcome to Finland — we would like to lecture you on the superiority of all of our social and technological institutions. And you're like: actually, Finland, you're really great at all these things, and I wish we could elect you to rule the world and implement all of these things in most of our countries in many ways. But it feels weird getting these tours of perfect worlds that then aren't also self-examining and dynamic.

So Terra Ignota is a hopeful future, but not a utopian future, because it has flaws. I remember when the first book came out, a lot of the initial discourse — the first blog posts of its earliest readers — was arguing about whether it was a utopia or a dystopia, trying to put it in one bucket or the other. "It has to be a utopia, everyone's happy, the lifespans are long." "No, it has censorship and surveillance, it has to be a dystopia." People would talk with each other before thinking through that it's an in-between. It has a lot of things that are better than our present and a few things that are worse than our present, and a lot of great achievements and a lot of stuff that still really needs to change. And a realistic future is one that is still changing.

⚠ The spoiler line

[01:00:44]

Ben: I'm going to transition us to speak about that realistic future. So — this is the spoiler warning. Anybody listening after this point: we expect you have read all the books. You will learn what happens in them. We will not explain anything.

This is the part I'm very excited about. Also, sidebar: the fourth book is actually my favorite one.

Ada: It's the best one. I needed all the other stuff before I could do that.

Ben: The speech about the Trunk War, and the in-path and the out-path — that got me.

Ada: Like the composer of a symphony, I needed to introduce all the leitmotifs and establish everything so that I could then do the final movement, in which everything happens at once. So I do setup, and I do more setup, and I do more setup — and then I have the full resources of those three books' worth of background, so that I can jump in and do things with an enormous complexity and depth that can only work when you have built that far.

How the economy works

[01:01:51]

Ben: Something you don't talk about very much in the books, but that I assume exists in the giant iceberg: how does the economy work? There are little hints — clearly there are still black markets, clearly there's some form of buying and selling — but beyond that it's really not explained. And we get hints that it works a little differently for different Hives.

Ada: We also know that the Hives resolve police conflicts with each other: when a member of one Hive has committed a crime against a member of another, the Hive that the person in the wrong came from pays the other Hive, and then punishes their own person by their own techniques. So a Mason receives the punishment a Mason normally gets, which might be much harsher than what the Cousins would normally do — but the Cousins get a certain amount of money that is standardized for the crime. So money is used among the Hives to balance out their frictions.

That means Hives are incentivized to discourage crimes by their members against other members, because it costs them a certain amount of money. But they're not super-mega-over-the-top incentivized. They would never spend half their budget on policing, because it's resolved.

Within that, the economy works quite differently for different Hives. The Mitsubishi and Humanists are on a very capitalist, more corporate model.

The Utopians are space communists. Everything you earn goes to space, and you receive back what you need to live. The constellations process things around, and there is enough for everyone to live in comfort, but you do not have private assets and private income.

It's set up the way a monastery runs. If you have a job and are a monk, this is just true: if you're a monk and you also have a professorship, your salary goes to the monastery, and you still receive the same meals and support and housing and stipend that any other monk does. It doesn't matter whether you're in a high-profit or low-profit job — you're doing a worthwhile job, therefore the Hive supports you, or the monastery supports you. So they're fully space communists: everything goes into the Hive and comes back out.

The Cousins have much more of a safety-net thing, where everybody has a guaranteed income, but you can also have additional income on top of that. And if you do have earned income, the Cousins take a very large slice of it in taxes, because they pay for so many services which both you and the world benefit from — and you feel good that, in a charitable way, you have funded schools and hospitals all over the world in a massive transformation. So that also appeals to somebody who, if they had supplementary income, would choose to give a lot of it to charity. You're sort of signing up in advance to have your income largely routed to charity, while you keep enough to live on and some more, so there's an incentive to earn more, but not a huge one.

The Masons have a complicated thing — this is why it's not in the book. It's calculated: the value of your contribution to the empire. How valuable a subject are you to Caesar? A number is put on that. And if you have a job or occupation that earns less than that, then you receive a stipend from the empire in credit for the services you've done to the empire. And if you're working directly for the empire, as the Guildbreakers do, then you receive a stipend from the emperor.

What it means is that a lot of Masons will fluctuate during their lifetime between "100% of my income is coming from a salary" and "now half my income is coming from a salary and half from the fact that I am a Masonic traffic guard, or whatever it is, working for Caesar." So Caesar pays this slice of my income, and my salary for something else pays another slice. And it's a point of pride to have more and more of it be your value from the empire — because then you're serving the empire better and doing more. Though there's also a point of pride in having a hundred percent from salary, so that you're not draining Caesar's purse.

Ben: I bet there are the two different groups of people — the one high status and the other high status — and they beef a little bit.

One currency, and the currencies underneath it

[01:07:06]

Ben: All of that implies some kind of single cross-Hive currency.

Ada: You'll notice all the prices are in euros throughout the book. Whenever any price is named, it's in euros. And the presumption is that Romanova administers a kind of central bank — and that the Censor's office is key to the administration of that central bank. The Censor's office is fundamentally doing economic analysis as well as social analysis.

Ben: Which sort of implies that Hives cannot operate like a lot of modern governments, where they print their own currency.

Ada: They can and they can't. You can still do currency exchange with the reservations, which are very intentionally not discussed very much in the first three books, so that we're sort of curious and slightly alarmed. And then they become so vividly present at major key moments in the last book, and you have this sort of backwards — I've been thinking of this as the marginal barbarians. Wait a minute, that's the United Nations. That's me. We are those marginal remnants — that's the evolution of the way we live now.

The other thing is that Hives can create internal fiat currencies of different sorts, that are tradable only among them and that only they would really care about.

So for example, the Mitsubishi have this: you get one vote for owning different amounts of property. Property and votes move together, and there's a unit which is one vote's worth of property — a significant value of a thing. And the Mitsubishi pay a lot of attention to those circulating.

So it's not a small currency, in that you would never buy a sandwich with it. It's a currency in which the smallest unit is $300,000 or $200,000, because it's the value of a condominium, basically. But people pay a lot of attention to it, care about it. They can't just generate more without building architecture — but they can generate more by the act of building architecture or buying property. And if Mitsubishi buys property, that transforms it from a thing that has cash value to a thing that has cash value and a vote's worth. And then it moves around.

So it operates in a complex way, like a non-fiat currency — a currency where there is a real thing attached to this unit of currency — but they only change hands for big deals, not small deals. And then people commit their vote to a voting bloc, which supports a higher voting bloc, so you're delegating your voting power rather than exercising it independently.

The campus system

[01:10:26]

Ben: I feel like I could talk about this for a very long time, but I have more spoiler questions. How does the campus system work?

Ada: A campus is referred to a number of times but never really explained. It's not quite a university, because it's a cluster in one area of multiple educational options. A campus might have a major research university, and three different colleges with different focuses, and several trade schools.

So you might choose to go to that campus to attend a research university. Or you might choose to go to that campus to get a trade school degree as an artisan and be a master glassblower. Or you might choose to go there and say: I like the mood of this campus. This is the Romanova campus, so everybody who goes here really cares about politics — but they want to do different things in politics. Some want to go to journalism school, some want to be lawyers and complete law school, some really want to be politicians, some really want to observe, some might want to be architects but are interested in political thought and how it informs architecture, so there's an architecture school there.

And you might be going for different lengths of time, because you might be doing different successive degrees. You might say: I really love political thought, I want to be in the city where it happens, I want to be in the community of other people where all my fellow students are into politics. So even though I want to be a doctor, I'll choose to go to medical school there, and make friends with somebody who's there to do architecture, and another friend who's there to get a polylaw degree and wants to be a polylaw. But we get to mix and mingle and enjoy debating and discussing and observing politics, united by that shared ethic for my bash'.

And then I made another place that's like: this is a campus designed for people who really love water sports. We're going to have fifteen different educational options — there will be a medical school, and a law school, and small liberal-arts-focused colleges, and a large research university here also — but all of them are structured around a bay that has really good surfing and where there are lots of boats. So if you're somebody who loves that kind of thing, and you think you probably want to have a bash' with people who share that passion, then you might choose to go to that campus.

You choose based on the campus and its mood, not based on which school is best for law. You can choose any campus and get a law degree there. So it's more about expecting that this is a personally formative phase of your life, in which you're going to find your bash' and find your bash'mates. So you go to the campus where you expect shared interest with those bash'mates.

And there are a few campuses that are dominantly Masons, where you go — you grew up a Mason, you're expected to be a Mason, you want all of your bash'mates to be Masons, and they do Masonic things, and probably you're going to join a hereditary Masonic bash'. But you still do need to go about finding your bash'. You might therefore choose to go to one that's dominantly Masons. But you could also go to the Romanova campus and be in the college that's a Masonic college at the Romanova campus, where one part of your social world is mostly Masons and another part is very mixed.

Ben: Administratively, are they all one organization, or just a bunch of co-located organizations?

Ada: Co-located organizations, with a central organization that maintains the campus as a whole. That organization doesn't do the admissions, or decide who's there, or what programs there are. But they collect money from all of the schools that benefit from the presence of this campus, and use that to maintain the grounds and the infrastructure and the safety and the boats. Or, in the case of the Romanova one, to have lecture series where they bring in statesmen to talk to the students.

So the central organization organizes the infrastructure and incentives that make the campus desirable, but it doesn't run the individual universities and schools. Those are still independent.

When a new campus is formed, it buys up a bunch of land and then either sells or leases that land to individual schools that want to develop there. Most often the format would be a hundred-year lease. And then after a hundred years we'll evaluate whether this school actually still is a major contributor to the thing or not — so that it's not constantly uncertain.

There's a symbiosis between the campus umbrella organization and the individual schools, but the individual schools are themselves separately run.

Ben: I love that.

Ada: There are already parts of the world where there are three or four colleges really near each other — like Cambridge, Massachusetts, where there are people from Harvard and people from MIT mixing with each other, and one of the things the two schools do is benefit from each other. And the more your educational experience is associated with bash' formation and cultural formation, the more that would orient around: let's make sure these are all actually places where you can form a really good bash', and have people with a variety of occupations nonetheless meet each other.

You then spend a variable amount of time at a campus, which can be as little as three years but is much more likely to be seven or eight or more, because you're doing a degree and then you might do a different degree. And it might be that you've formed a bash', but you're one of the older members and the others are still finishing their major degrees, and you think: okay, well, I'll do an extra master's in medieval Arabic literature, because I can, while waiting for my bash'mates to complete their primary employment degrees. Or I'll live and work while living at the campus, and not be kicked out by the dorm process — because the dorms are open so long as you're a bash' that's forming and at least one of your members hasn't finished a degree.

Utopia: how constellations work

[01:17:05]

Ben: Because of my specific bias, I have some Utopia-specific questions.

Ada: That's very appropriate.

Ben: How do constellations work?

Ada: I do sell more of the Utopia stickers and Utopia flags than any of the other Hives'.

Ben: I assume people do bias toward it. A number of friends and I have been trying to figure out: mechanically, how do constellations work? How does Utopia come to a consensus?

Ada: The core of it is an incredibly high-trust environment. Anybody who has become a Utopian trusts the rest of Utopia enough to hand over all of your income, and take that oath of devoting your hours to this, and trust in this group and in this system. So it's a very high-trust organization. You need to believe that everybody actually has the same priorities as you.

And that is then very carefully set up to not have celebrity leader figures, but instead to have infrastructure which asks: okay, how large a group do we need to run, say, keeping track of our profit and deficit currencies in transactions with other Hives, so that we make sure our economy is okay? Is that best done by one bash'? Is that best done by a dozen specialists, or ten dozen specialists, or several thousand people working in a larger group?

You look at a question and optimize what the best structure for this problem is, and you then have people who have appropriate skills to be good at that problem assigned to that constellation. And that constellation then makes its own decisions about when it needs to be bigger or smaller, when something has changed.

If you sign up as a Utopian and you have a certain skill set, you might be contacted and told: the XYZ constellation needs the skills that you have, will you please work with them? Or: this lab needs the skills that you have. Or: no specific constellation needs the skills that you have right now, please go forth and start a bakery, or whatever it is that you want to do — contributing in general to the world, because we need bakeries just as much as we need astronauts to function as a Hive and as a society and be happy. And that happiness allows us to produce more.

So it's intentional that a constellation is really vague. It might be tiny, it might be three people, it might be three thousand people — whatever the problem that constellation is dedicated to requires. And if you're in a particular constellation, you understand very well how your constellation works, but you may have comparatively little knowledge at all about how another constellation is working, because you're not involved in the infrastructure that makes that decision. So the power is very decentralized.

Ben: I guess that requires a lot of self-control — "that constellation is doing this thing that I think is really cool, but they don't need me doing that right now."

Ada: They do care a lot about passion. If you contact a constellation and say, "Hey, I absolutely love fluid dynamics, I would love to be part of this team," they'll take that seriously. And they might say, "Okay, great — we weren't actively looking for another person to do X, but we could totally use your skills, please join this team." Or it might be, "We really don't have room for another person to do this yet, but we'll keep you in mind, and we'll probably contact you within the next five years when somebody retires or switches over, and you'll be in line to do this next. Meanwhile, enjoy yourself and hone your other skills, or contribute to this other group in this other way."

How Utopia votes

[01:21:18]

Ben: How do they get to — I want to use the term — almost a global consensus, making Utopia-wide decisions? Whether to intervene, for example.

Ada: Much like the Humanists, they will say: this constellation has been discussing this issue, we realize everyone is discussing this issue, this is too big to delegate, therefore we're going to hold a vote on this question, and by Thursday please respond. And then they ask everyone to vote. Voting is very easy and digital — you just do it on your tracker to indicate your opinion.

So there is an element of major questions like: do we do the Harbinger strike or do we not? Where they say: this is a very serious question. We want everyone to take two weeks to debate it with each other. So we're announcing the question now, and in two weeks we expect everyone to vote on it. Meanwhile, please discuss. Experts will post opinions. You are also encouraged to post your own opinions. There will be a flurry of discussion about it. And then we expect everyone to make up their minds by the end of the two weeks as to whether this is happening or not.

Ben: This gets into more political theory than I have expertise in, but even deciding who gets to decide what then gets voted on seems tricky.

Ada: For example, with the Harbinger strike, they can't tell people "here is the specific plan," because one billion people are not going to keep a secret like that. But they can say: the vote is, do we intervene in the war in ways that we believe will save millions of lives, but will bring the anger of the larger Leviathans down upon us — protecting the Earth at the cost of endangering Utopia? So it would be framed in that abstract term. And there might be thought-experiment examples: this isn't what we're doing, but if it were like this, or like this, which of these would you vote for in this imagined scenario?

Ben: It seems like presumably there's a constellation responsible for generating the questions to vote on.

Ada: No — it's more that other constellations will realize, wait a minute, we could do this thing, we are going to do this thing. And any constellation will then refer that to the constellation that organizes these votes. And they will discuss: do we definitely think we need to vote on this? How should it be framed? But the question might come from a different constellation.

So there might be a question relating to early childhood education regulations — what kinds of recommendations are made for the stimulation of the mind of a baby between birth and two years old. That would come from an education mega-constellation, and the early childhood education sub-constellation within that, based on new scientific data it got from people studying cognitive neural development. And that group would discuss it and say: we think this major thing should happen, but it's kind of controversial. Voting constellation — do you think we should implement this, or do you think we should have people vote on it?

And they might decide: actually, I think we should just implement that. It's a highly technical and expert thing, all the evidence is in favor of it, it's clearly a good without as many downsides, we don't feel it needs a vote. People have effectively consented by trusting expertise to be expert. But there will be other situations where it's harder to predict the full weight of this, and it has a big ethical weight, therefore we're going to put it to the whole populace.

There are studies that show that experts versus random citizens are better at solving different types of problems. There are high-predictability problems and low-predictability problems.

A high-predictability problem, for example: a hurricane is going to land at X time and hit X city coming from X direction. We know this is coming, we have two days' warning, it might vary in strength by this amount and veer by this amount, but fundamentally we know that it's happening, we can predict a whole lot about it, and therefore we need to plan and act upon the evacuations and make the hard choices about what gets evacuated most. That is a high-predictability question, and experts are better at coming up with what to do and how to solve it than non-experts.

But then you have a low-predictability question — like, Twitter has just been invented. It's going to change how people see the news. That's going to shift how human beings make up their minds about political thought and communicate. And it's going to make new avenues for celebrity and influence. What the heck is that going to do to our society? Here's a bunch of what historians can tell us, but kind of, we don't know. Here's a bunch of different uncertainties in this low-predictability problem. What should we do?

A panel of random citizens is better at solving that problem than experts are, because they bring a wider variety of perspectives and suggest a wider variety of things. You get "well, let's try these eight different things" instead of "let's just try the one thing that expert consensus falls upon." And that actually works better for low-predictability problems.

So the voting in Utopia tends to be on low-predictability problems and big questions of ethics and danger — where you do want everyone opting in and voting. That is also a consolidator of solidarity. If a couple of times a year you and all of the Utopians vote on a question, you feel the civic participation. You get the reinforcement of: many decisions are made by constellations that I don't even understand and just have to trust, but big ones are made by me and everyone around me, and we vote every so often on these questions.

Ben: But there's never a face attached to the vote. You're not voting for a person or a leader.

Ada: There's no charisma cult and there's no campaigning. It's just: here is this effectively ballot question with a short turnaround. Yes or no. Go for it.

Why nobody games their way into Utopia

[01:27:58]

Ben: All this is very contingent on how they generate the high trust. You could imagine that if it were just "you say the oath and show up and you're in," you'd get a lot of people who aren't really in it for the right reasons.

Ada: People ask about that sometimes. One of the filters is that this is high work, low reward. Why would you game the system to join Utopia and be something of a social outcast, in order to give up all of your income and receive only a small portion of it back, and be governed by people you don't know — when you could instead join the Cousins and have a guaranteed comfortable affluence, and keep anything you earn on top of that, and have even more social services, and positive rather than negative social stigma?

Ben: So the counterfactual matters.

Ada: Are you the kind of ambitious person who wants to work and get ahead? Then you're going to join either the Mitsubishi or the Humanists, where you can get ahead and where there is wealth. A Utopian can't be rich. A Utopian can be lazy — but it's easier to be lazy as a Cousin. Or as a Mitsubishi, where as long as you own at least a home, which they will work on helping you earn enough to have, then you're going to be courted by the different voting blocs who will give you things in return for support. So when you throw your vote behind something, you get a quid pro quo for it.

So it's the combination of high effort, low reward. You're paid in the knowledge that someday people will be on Mars — and that your ashes will be on Mars. But that's all you get. You don't get wealth, and you don't get fame, and you don't get power.

Ben: And you don't get a ladder that you feel like you're climbing.

Ada: And you're a semi-social outcast. And that's not an uncalculated thing. Utopians could be less weird. They could wear normal lenses like everybody else, instead of weird visors that create social isolation and make everyone else slightly distrustful. But the negative stigma is one of the things that means that if you're thinking about wanting to get ahead into a comfortable, happy life, you don't think Utopia. Utopia is a life of hard work and no reward, except the knowledge that someday a tree will grow on Mars, and you will be part of the soil.

Why Utopia doesn't schism

[01:31:01]

Ben: How does Utopia not schism? I can imagine genuine Utopians who say, we shouldn't be going to Mars, we should be building a whole bunch of O'Neill cylinders and populating L3 and going out to the asteroids.

Ada: We know that they have all those space stations and space cities that we see in the third book. They're doing plural stuff as well, while maintaining this long project — in the same way that cities built a cathedral for 500 years. There is a pride in continuing an old project and that dream.

When there are schisms, there are often schisms within a constellation, where, just like in any corporation, people are bickering with each other. And that has to be navigated the same way any interdepartmental or intradepartmental fight is navigated. They would certainly have constellations whose job it is to help other constellations that are having social strife resolve their social strife.

But if you're in the constellations that propose space projects, you can propose lots of space projects parallel to the Mars project as well. Nobody's going to say, let's stop doing Mars halfway through and abandon it. It's an old tradition. It's part of what made you love this. You listened to "Somebody Will" and you wept. You want to maintain that link, that set of tradition, and finish the cathedral — even if you're also building and doing lots of other things along the way, whether it's developing space stations or reducing the fatality rate of a world war.

Ben: There's still this thing in my head: at some point, when Utopia was young, Mars was not yet the cathedral.

Ada: When Utopia was young, there was a different world war that was way nastier. And nothing creates solidarity like "the world is at war and we need solidarity, so we are leaning on each other and are united." Young Utopia is united the same way Britain is united during the Blitz. We have to depend on each other or this will be wiped out. We're going to work really hard to be united in this moment. And if it were disunited, then Utopia would not have succeeded. It presumes that this is the one where it didn't fragment and it did endure that long.

Another thing the Mars program does for Utopia is that whenever you have a new plan — hey, let's build this giant tube in space — the question isn't "is it worth building the giant tube in space?" The question is "is it more worth building the giant tube in space than dedicating those resources to Mars going a little faster?"

So you have this different way of thinking about which projects to undertake. Not "is it worth it," but "is it more worth it than what we give up?" And there's a very high bar for what we give up. What we give up is Mars, maybe a little slower.

If everyone has been invested in this, and it's been 250 years, and you know that all your predecessors were invested in it, and you chose this way of life in part because you love that dream and you want to help make it a reality — then when someone says, hey, let's make genetically engineered super-eggplants, everyone's going to debate: is that better than those same resources going to the thing we're doing that we know is a good thing?

Which just changes the tenor of a conversation, so that it's not "is X worth doing," it's "is X more worth doing than what we would do otherwise." And that creates a shared and interesting discourse, so that every time a new project is proposed, everyone discusses: well, what is the value of Mars? What is the value of this? Is this something that enriches and advances human civilization enough that it will make up for it in the end? Because when we all have genetically engineered super-eggplants, Mars will go faster, thanks to the genetically engineered super-eggplants, will it not? But everyone will be happier due to genetically engineered super-eggplants. Is that worth X minutes of Mars?

It makes for a very unified — everyone is now discussing this issue in the same way, with the same baseline. And it establishes a shared baseline for debating the value of things.

Identity, diet, and the weight of the coat

[01:35:46]

Ben: When you have that attitude, how does that not fall into the same traps that utilitarianism falls into?

Ada: It occasionally can.

There's a very good book on the history of vegetarianism, the name of which I cannot remember, which is really a book about what makes cultural minorities thrive and sustain themselves over the long term while remaining a minority.

It made the observation that there is an extremely high correlation between a minority cultural identity lasting a really long time and having some dietary restrictions about what you eat. Whether it's that you have to be vegetarian, or you have to not eat pork, or you have to follow these kosher rules, or Pythagoreans don't eat beans — whatever it is. There's a huge correlation between "this minority group managed to sustain a shared solidarity and identity over time; it didn't grow and become huge, but remained solid and never died out" and special diet.

Why is that? Because when you're on a special diet, every day, at least twice and usually more than twice, you have to make a set of choices that slightly separate you from everyone around you, reinforcing your presence in that identity group. And even if you don't follow the strict diet of the identity group, you think about the fact that you're choosing not to follow — that you're choosing to eat this thing, that you're choosing to eat shrimp and not pork, or whatever decision you personally have made. It means you think about your identity all the time, and you have multiple moments in the day when you come to think about it.

Therefore other things — like having a specific thing that you wear, or a specific way that you interface with the world — can also have that same strong solidarity effect.

So a Utopian gets up in the morning and puts on that visor, and puts on that actually quite heavy coat. It's comfortable, and it's climate controlled inside, but you notice it. You notice the weight of it. You put on the weight of your membership in Utopia every day. And as you move around the world, the infinite to-do-list pop-ups in your lens, in your visor, make you think about the world in a slightly different way, and perhaps once or twice a day you stop and act upon "hey, this fence could be fixed in ten minutes if someone did this."

It has that same effect. Which is why Utopia is envisioned as not growing. The other Hives, a lot of them are growing; Utopia is not. Utopia remains the smallest by a large amount, because it's about being part of this very specific identity group that is a minority identity group living among others, and making this new choice every day to get up and put on your monk robe and hang out with your slightly sideways friends who are dedicated to this particular pursuit of ad astra per aspera.

So it operates and succeeds for the same reason that monastic life did, and that cultural minorities like Sikhs and Jews continue — because it has carefully oriented itself around pride in that identity, helping people to care deeply about the insubstantial rewards of sticking to this, more so than the personal rewards, which are easier to get in other paths.

"I am a servant, but I am not your servant"

[01:39:21]

Ben: That's beautiful. You're obviously speaking straight to my biases as a Utopian.

Ada: To a Utopian, yeah. To be a Utopian is to get up every morning and make decisions that are going to be in service of this long-term thing, and not in service of short-term things, or of yourself.

Ben: I appreciate being reminded of that.

Ada: There's a wonderful line in Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, when they're trying to get him to stay on an island instead of going on an important magical quest — the people who hired him to be there on the island. And he says: your excellencies would do well to remember that while I am a servant, I am not your servant.

That's the way to think about it. I serve a different, more distant, higher thing. I am a servant, but I am not the servant of this company, or this university, or this historical moment, or this generation. And to have pride in that service, and the ability to take a deep breath and relax and remember it — so that when the pettiness and crisis of today looms, you take a deep breath and you say: I am a servant, but I am not your servant, crisis. I will do the best I can. And so long as the long-term thing I serve is safe, and we are marching steadily toward it, little brick by little brick, laying stepping stones, I'm happy to have that reward, and to do what I need to in the present.

Closing

[01:41:14]

Ben: That seems like a perfect place to stop. I have many, many questions I did not ask, but time is short.

Ada: Maybe we can do it again at some point.

Ben: I would love to. I don't know how to express enough gratitude through this computer medium.

Ada: Oh, my treat. I love to connect with people.

In case you don't know, listener, there is a really thriving Terra Ignota Discord server, where there are lots of wonderful Terra Ignota fans discussing with each other all the time. I pop in from time to time and do sort of AMA things. So you can connect with your fellow Utopians, Cousins, Masons, et cetera.

Ben: I'll put a link in the show notes.

Ada: This spring, in March, I had an essay collection co-authored with Jo Walton come out, called Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. If you enjoy science fiction and thinking about what it is and what it does, you'd enjoy that collection a lot.

And it should be the second week of August that pre-orders go live for And Loki in His Prison, which is my new novel — the first of a duology on Norse myth, that I have, as always, been worldbuilding for more than five years, outlining for six months, and then writing. So I hope that if you enjoyed Terra Ignota you will enjoy it, different as it is, but with just as much meat to chew on. It is historical fantasy rather than future science fiction, so: different stuff.

Ben: Amazing. Thank you for everything that you do.

Ada: Astra mortemque superare gradatim. We have to remember the gradatim above all.