00:00:00.000Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guest
00:00:07.580is science fiction author Becky Chambers. And she is one of my favorite science fiction authors
00:00:13.080who's working today. And the reason is just that her work is so warm and so welcoming.
00:00:20.340A friend of mine introduced me to her first book, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet,
00:00:24.940right after the 2016 election, when I was very unhappy, as I imagine most of you were as well,
00:00:32.320listeners. And I knew when I started this podcast that she was one of my dream guests,
00:00:39.020and I feel so fortunate that I was able to have one of my favorite authors on the show.
00:00:44.680So without any further ado, here's Becky Chambers.
00:00:47.920becky welcome to dreaming against the machine thank you so much i'm excited to be here it's
00:00:57.460great to have you here you are one of the people who i have wanted to have on this podcast since
00:01:01.720i came up with the idea um you know not to you know put you on the spot or make you feel
00:01:06.280self-conscious in any way uh no i i've been a fan of your books for quite some time and um
00:01:13.480And it's just a delight to actually be able to talk to you. And this is one of the nice things about having a podcast is you get an excuse to call up writers who you like and say, hey, can I talk to you on my podcast person? I don't know whose work I like. So I have several other friends, some of whom are writers who are quite envious that I'm actually having a conversation with you right now.
00:01:36.360Oh, well, I hope I live up to expectations then. I'll do my best.
00:01:41.800Don't worry about it. I'm a giant goof. Don't worry about it.0.94
00:05:26.460You said that your books are intentionally warm and hopeful.
00:05:32.800I would love to hear more about how you do that
00:05:36.700and why you made the choice to do that.
00:05:38.740I think that when telling stories about the future, which is in essence what science fiction is, we're telling stories about worlds that could be, even if they are actually impossible in our real world.
00:05:53.440We're talking, you know, it's all one big what if.
00:09:42.000Now, granted, I grew up in a family very involved in space science. So it's weird to say that like my tweens is when I got into it. But really, like space was just kind of what my family did. Like my my dad was an aerospace engineer. My mom was an astrobiology educator. And I so I grew up in that and it was always just around. But I was really my tweens when I sort of fell in love with it on my own terms.
00:10:08.680There was just this whole convergence of things that happened in my life then. Things like, you know, we got the National Geographic issue with the Hubble photographs. And I remember lying on my terrible carpet in my childhood bedroom, pouring through those pictures and thinking they were just the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
00:10:28.380The movie Contact came out, and that was my introduction to Carl Sagan. And I just vacuumed up all of his writing. I was enormously into Star Trek as a kid. Movie First Contact came out during that time as well.
00:10:46.600You were just hitting all of the stuff from my own childhood. This is incredible.
00:10:51.420Right? You know, I mean, it was understanding that cosmic perspective, understanding the simultaneous beauty and insignificance of human existence, understanding things like the overview effect.
00:11:09.560You know, how when astronauts go out to space, they often have these very profound transformative moments of looking back at Earth and coming home and being like, I need to help.
00:11:20.660I need to, you know, they go into public service, they go into humanitarian sectors, you know, like there is something that happens to you out there.
00:11:30.420And that understanding is what makes me want to help, makes me want to, you know, follow the campsite rule and try to leave the world, you know, just a smidge better than it was when I stepped into it.
00:11:51.220um, you know, and I'm just one person writing books. I don't have like a, a super, um, inflated
00:11:59.000sense of my own self-importance here. I'm just one book on the shelf, you know, but like,
00:12:03.320that is what drives my work. And so it, it just, that's just the sandbox I love to play in. It's
00:12:13.720the sandbox I always loved to play in as a kid. I loved, um, stories about spaceships. I loved
00:12:19.220imagining myself in a spaceship. Um, and that hasn't changed. I mean, maybe that'll change
00:12:24.740down the road, but, uh, for now that's, that's where my imagination lives. I love this. And not
00:12:31.080just because, uh, you know, you're, you're basically describing my own childhood in lots
00:12:36.280of ways, huge Star Trek fan, a huge Carl Sagan fan, uh, just vacuumed up everything I could find
00:12:43.600of both of those, both Sagan and Star Trek
00:12:48.000and any sort of space-based science fiction
00:13:09.700have you found some people maybe take it too literally you know that the future has to be
00:13:17.420in space I think you know what I'm getting at I know exactly what you're getting at I know exactly
00:13:22.620what you're getting at um yeah I think there are a lot of people who take it too literally
00:13:26.900and I think there are a lot of people who clearly have read books that they didn't understand and I
00:13:34.040don't mean that in a gatekeepy way I don't mean that in a literary snob sort of way
00:13:39.340The point of these stories – well, let me back that up because there are definitely stories that fall into the category I'm about to describe.
00:13:50.060If you think that humans should be in space for reasons of manifest destiny, you have missed the point entirely.
00:14:00.380And yes, there have been plenty of works of classic science fiction that push that narrative, and we are all working within that tradition.
00:14:08.080And there is a lot of conversation, both, you know, just sort of, you know, over the coffee table conversation and also the conversation that is happening in our work in contemporary science fiction about that legacy and how we grapple with that legacy.
00:14:24.980Because we are dealing with a lot of ideas that are rooted in a very military, colonialist sort of future.
00:14:34.760and i know that's not what a lot of us want you know that's not how you and i came here when we
00:14:40.940were reading space stories as a kid that's not what we were picking up out of it no um and so
00:14:46.060it is a complicated legacy and it's one we have to deal with and that's true in the real world
00:14:50.180of human spaceflight as well we like to talk about it as though it's this um it's always been
00:14:56.520this uh unifying like uh humanistic endeavor it was born out of the cold war like let's be
00:15:04.280extremely clear about this and it is still um funded largely uh for reasons of political
00:15:13.160posturing um and and now nowadays also out of um resource extraction and market domination like
00:15:20.480these are not things that this is not a space program that i want to be on board with right
00:15:27.480Like if you said, would you like to ride on this specific rocket ship?
00:15:46.020You want to seek out new life and new civilizations.
00:15:48.840And new civilizations as respectfully as possible, right?
00:15:52.060Like again, the campsite rule, leave it better than you found it.
00:15:55.160Um, so yes, I, I think a lot about how science fiction is contributing to that conversation, how science fiction is contributing to, you know, the public idea about what space exploration is for, right? Like, why are we going out there? Who does this belong to?
00:16:13.960I think there has been a dominant narrative that has been in effect for a really long time that is counter to or sort of cancels out these ideas of let's do this for all of humanity.
00:16:30.420Let's do this, you know, just for the pure love of the game, right?
00:16:35.180I think we really need to shift on how it is that we're thinking about space, both in fiction and in real life.
00:16:44.200Because really, I mean, that's two sides of the same coin.
00:16:48.060Obviously, I'm hideously biased, but I think that you might enjoy reading my most recent book, More Everything Forever.
00:16:56.380But we can talk more about that offline.
00:16:58.240And I don't need this podcast to be me plugging my book to you.
00:17:02.600I mean, what else is the point of having your own podcast if not to plug your own book?
00:17:07.800Oh, well, but I assume that most of my, if not all of my listeners already know that I have a book called More Everything Forever available wherever fine books are sold.
00:17:18.940Coming out in paperback, I don't know, end of the year.
00:17:54.680So someone who reads and has always read just copious quantities of science fiction, on the one hand, I want stories about space. On the other hand, I don't think that the future of humanity lies in space.
00:18:11.600And I think that the sort of this idea of the future inevitably being in space is doing a lot of damage right now, like in the political arena of the world in ways that I am trying to fight and everyone I know and love who is working with me on this is also trying to fight this stuff.
00:18:35.760And like the, I don't know when this episode is going to come out, but there was the, I was on vacation last week and while I was on vacation, very rude, the SpaceX IPO happened and just absolute nonsense.
00:18:48.960It's like finding out that someone that you hate has the same favorite movie as you and that they got, but, but then that like they, they got something completely different.
00:19:02.720Yeah. They just didn't get it. Like, oh my God. Okay. No, I'm going to, I'm going to dunk on
00:19:07.860someone here. Did you ever, it's not going to be the usual suspect. Do you remember a few years
00:19:14.860back there was this media outfit called Aussie media? No, I don't remember this. No, that's good.
00:19:21.140That's good. You don't remember it because it didn't, it wasn't something that most people
00:19:25.200looked at. It made a big splash within the world of journalism though, by claiming that it had a
00:19:30.540really huge readership. It did not. What ultimately happened was, uh, it was discovered
00:19:36.080that they were engaging in a large amount of fraud, not just, you know, pumping up their, um,
00:19:40.540their readership numbers artificially, but also like impersonating partners, like having calls
00:19:47.700with investors where they were impersonating executives at companies that they were supposedly
00:19:51.780partnering with, but they weren't. Um, yeah, I know. And ultimately, yeah, exactly. And ultimately
00:19:58.100like the head of this company um got convicted of some kind of corporate fraud um and uh and then
00:20:06.040of course his sentence was i believe commuted by trump um because you know trump loves it when
00:20:11.200people do a fraud but um but the name of this media outfit ozzy ozy why there was an interview
00:20:21.300with this guy carlos watson who was the head of of ozzy media the one who who you know got uh
00:20:28.020convicted and then his sentence was commuted or he
00:22:56.960I think that we should be studying space however we're doing it, whether that be with robots or with people, whichever way is best.
00:23:03.120But I think the question of why we are doing this always needs to be at the forefront.
00:23:06.860It can't just be we should go because we should go.
00:23:09.880that's how you break everything um so i think um it's tough right because we when i say we i'm
00:23:19.420talking about you and me and everybody we're in community with we're talking about scientists who
00:23:23.580are constantly scrambling for for grant money and we're talking about uh writers a famously
00:23:29.320a stable group of people who are financially stable mentally stable uh yeah absolutely
00:23:40.100but i mean the thing of it is it's like it's this very grubby capitalist thing right because it's
00:23:44.480like on the one hand i don't want it to come down to who has the money and the power but that
00:23:48.620is unfortunately what it comes down to but it doesn't mean that we are then powerless right
00:23:55.340It's not zero sum. We have the ability to tell stories. We have the ability to still be trying to shift this narrative in our own way. We have the ability to do what's in our power to do, whether that be writing a story in which we're going about this differently, whether that be engaging in citizen science, whether that be going to a public star party, something like that.
00:24:21.620Like, there are still things we can be doing within our own communities, within our own little, you know, our tiny little ponds to be shifting this and to be, you know, getting the word out there that, no, space actually is for everybody.
00:24:39.020You know, it sounds trite, but it's true.
00:24:45.520Back to Carl Sagan, because everything goes back to Carl Sagan.
00:24:48.500but this idea of the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot right yeah these people who
00:24:55.040are not reading the books and who are you know seeing the cosmos as their own playground um
00:25:02.980they too are temporary and they too are stardust you know um it's it's tough out there right now
00:25:10.040and it is demoralizing i think in a lot of ways but for me at least that just makes me double down
00:25:15.280all the harder on being like, no, it doesn't have to be like this. Um, you know, and, and I think
00:25:22.260that's all we can do when, when facing something that seems, um, impossible or inevitable is just
00:25:31.300to say, well, no, it doesn't have to be. You are also echoing stuff that's in more everything
00:25:36.600forever. I have to stop saying that, but, um, well, here, here, you know, what's make you feel
00:25:42.240better i'll plug a book too oh yeah please yes uh yes now now we're both now we can both feel a
00:25:47.580little bit grubby about it both feel a little like uh i hate doing this yeah no literal worst
00:25:53.260thing it's the literal actual worst it's the literal actual worst um it's why i'm very glad
00:25:59.240to be a bit of shop talk here but it's why i personally really like being traditionally
00:26:04.440published because somebody else handles all the publicity and all the marketing stuff that makes
00:26:08.960me want to go bury myself in a hole exactly you know um yeah no oh um but i will i will just note
00:26:15.300uh because it is relevant um that your your question of you know how do how do i feel about
00:26:22.320uh the current state of space exploration what are my feelings about uh human humanity in space
00:26:29.080uh should you perhaps happen to read my upcoming book as you wake break the shell which will be
00:26:35.440out this October, you may notice a shift in my feelings about a human future in space.
00:26:45.380Oh, well, now I'm even more excited to read it. I'm looking forward to it.
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00:29:23.080I actually have some sort of shop talky things I want to talk with you about. What are the nuts
00:29:29.600and bolts of it for you? Like, how do you actually go about building a world that feels warm and
00:29:38.620cozy and welcoming i mean like i hear people use the term like hope punk and i never love labels
00:29:45.900how do you feel about like are there labels that you are okay with for the particular sub genre
00:29:52.640that you work in i'm comfortable with whatever labels people want to give my work like if they're
00:29:57.900useful for other people that's fine from my point of view i just write science fiction yeah full
00:30:02.440stop like i i am not um i'm not trying to hit a particular sub-genre shelf i'm just writing what
00:30:11.420i write and however people want to shelve that that's good by me you know so nuts and bolts nuts
00:30:17.200and bolts right largely in my work i am interested in quiet stories about ordinary people within
00:30:25.160bigger fan more fantastical universes not universally true across everything i've written
00:30:30.820But largely, I am writing very character-driven work that is very focused on sort of small, everyday things.
00:30:39.060I will be the first person to tell people, if you're looking for, like, a big, crunchy planet exploding plot, I am the last person you read, right?
00:30:50.600Because I am interested, because my primary driver is making the reader feel like they are at home in space, that they are at home in the universe, I want to reach the reader where they're at.
00:31:03.900And the reader is almost certainly not going to be a big mover and shaker, not going to be someone of historical importance.
00:31:10.600They're just going to be someone sitting in their living room.
00:31:13.340And so I want to be like, cool, let me show you somebody sitting in their living room in space.
00:31:17.220Let me show you what that might be like.
00:31:18.720um i take in my in my world building and also in um the things i tend to focus on um within you
00:31:28.520know setting setting the scene i take a lot of inspiration from real life in the questions that
00:31:34.420people ask astronauts um if you go see an astronaut speak which i highly recommend people do
00:31:41.160because it's a fantastic experience but people all of all ages always ask the same questions
00:31:47.100what do you eat how do you sleep and how do you go to the bathroom these are always what people
00:31:52.660want to know and the thing about it is those are the questions we also ask ourselves when we're
00:31:58.640traveling yeah right where am i staying what hotel am i staying at or am i staying with a friend
00:32:03.320what's it going to be like there where can i eat um you know just i i want a sense for the
00:32:08.420neighborhood you want to make sure that all your creature comforts are taken care of right
00:32:11.640um so I put a lot of focus in my work on those sorts of things on everyday things yeah there's
00:32:19.500a lot of cool tech around but just like I don't know exactly how it is that my my smartphone works
00:32:26.840I I kind of know how my computer works I can swap out a motherboard but I can't tell you
00:32:31.780how like I can't tell you how this thing works but I can tell you like how to make a grilled
00:32:37.920cheese sandwich. You know, I can tell you how to do a load of laundry. Like those are things I
00:32:42.840actually understand because I use them every day. So that's where I put my focus. I put my focus on
00:32:48.700how do people live? Where are you sleeping? If we're talking about different alien species,
00:32:54.480how is that different for them? What are we eating? What does it smell like? What does it feel like?
00:32:59.220I love doing that kind of work also because it, you know, when you're talking about food and
00:33:04.220material trade. That's how you build the politics of a place. That's how you understand the history
00:33:09.340of a place. That's how you understand the environment of a place. It all comes down to
00:33:12.880what do we actually have to use? What can we actually eat? All those little details are where
00:33:21.340I start. And yeah, that just gives me endless fuel for telling stories from there.
00:33:29.020okay i'm gonna get like really inside baseball not just in terms of writing but also in terms
00:33:36.400of like details of your books there is a moment in the long way to a small angry planet that i
00:33:43.500think about a lot well i think about a bunch of different things in your books a lot um i i really
00:33:49.580like your books there's a moment in that one though it's a conversation between two people
00:33:57.360on the ship where most of the book takes place and they're talking about like what they're
00:34:05.220going to do that day and it's like it's a it's a fairly mundane day on the ship and one of them
00:34:11.300says something like well i don't want to play because like the the the book is it takes place
00:34:16.820on a ship with multiple different species on it and humans are just one of them um and one of them
00:34:24.100says to the other well i don't want to play one of those you know competitive human board games
00:34:29.220let's play one of those other games from like i don't remember which one uh which species that
00:34:34.960where like we work together to solve a problem or or you know something like that and
00:34:40.120i think about that a lot because i i like games i like board games and so many of them are
00:34:50.240competitive and i mean there are cooperative ones um and and they're also cooperative activities
00:34:55.640that we don't think of as games per se like maybe jigsaw puzzles things like that but little
00:35:04.580details like that that feel i mean i'm gonna reveal my politics here though though i don't
00:35:13.180know you probably already know them and everybody listening definitely does if they've listened to
00:35:17.100any other episodes of this show uh little details like that that both feel very like warm and
00:35:23.060comfortable and also pretty explicitly anti-capitalist yeah i don't think that's a
00:35:29.620surprise to anybody reading my books or just the way that you talk about mars as a place that was
00:35:39.040eaten by human capitalism how did you make the decision to do things like that that's it and
00:35:46.860have to rewind when i was writing a long way which but i mean the writing was on the wall
00:35:52.280then right like science fiction is never meant to like predict anything that's absolutely not
00:35:57.560um what i'm doing here it's you know it we're just we're just telling stories like that's it
00:36:03.240we're sitting around a campfire but there is a part of me that looks at the world building in
00:36:08.140the long way which i wrote in 2012 uh and had started working on in the aughts was when i
00:36:15.860started thinking about that book you know this idea of all the rich people went to mars when
00:36:22.440the earth's ecosystem started to collapse and all the people left on earth it was a huge catastrophe
00:36:30.220for them and they had to scramble to leave earth because earth was no longer habitable by humans
00:36:37.200and so what you end up with uh several hundred years later is this big cultural split between
00:36:43.560between the humans who stayed in the solar system, um, largely anchored around Mars and the humans
00:36:50.640who boarded generation ships to go elsewhere. And this is something that is explored a lot
00:36:57.300through the whole series. Right. And this again, goes back to the thing I said at the start of,
00:37:02.800there is no one solution for everyone. And if you have a society that is so defined by the haves
00:37:10.440and have nots um who is your future in space really for and what does that mean for the people
00:37:17.900you leave behind right yeah i mean that was that was a huge i that was a huge piece of how i thought
00:37:25.380about humans in that story but also things like i'm really glad you brought up the the board games
00:37:30.420because um uh i too love games that probably also comes across yes i love i love games um
00:37:38.420um but um you know these ideas that um you see a lot of in in things like star trek which i love
00:37:45.940with my whole heart yes but it's like everybody has a version of chess yes right like or everybody
00:37:51.000has um you know these these pastimes or these social structures that are very analogous to us
00:37:58.260everybody has marriage right like and it's like why like that's everywhere and so um i really i
00:38:05.820I really like being contrary with the things we are told are human nature or like a universal human trait.
00:38:16.140Oh, we're, you know, we're inherently competitive.
00:38:19.460It's like, you don't even have to leave this planet to see that that is not true in the history of our species, right?
00:38:27.540Um, and so those are the, those are the things I, I eternally love to play with is just, well, why does the game have to be competitive? Why does a culture have to have a military? Why do they have to have a religion? Like, that's my job, right? Just to pick at those things and say, well, what about this instead? Not because I have some grand agenda about it or because it's like, and the moral of the story is not, it's just saying it could be different.
00:38:55.520I feel obliged to, to say, I like your books. And one of the things I didn't like was this idea that, oh, there's an ecological collapse on earth. So we have to go to Mars and go to generation ships. Because there's just no way. I mean, and I know that you weren't saying that that's what's going to happen.
00:39:17.600sure but i just i was like i really love this world and i'm so tired of of people saying oh
00:39:26.980well you know earth is doomed so let's go to mars uh you know earth is doomed so we got to get in
00:39:33.400generation ships and like okay first of all generation ships are like a crime against future
00:39:38.460generations and second there's nothing that could happen to earth that would make it less hospitable
00:39:45.840than mars uh unless it was literally completely destroyed but i like your books anyway
00:39:53.780because like because the other thing is like i love star trek i'm i'm a physicist
00:39:59.920you know warp drive is not happening we're not going faster than the speed of light that's just
00:40:05.780not gonna happen let me be a hundred percent clear in real life mars is not happening yeah
00:40:11.480like there it's not like if if we manage that it would be the most miserable existence we are not
00:40:18.500terraforming mars it would be so much easier to put our resources into sustaining habitability
00:40:25.520on our own planet the planet that we evolved for that that is you know this is the difference right
00:40:31.180this is where we we we jump away from science fiction and say okay what do i really think what
00:40:35.800was it really like we're not going to mars yeah you know um this is one of those things that i
00:40:41.360I feel is important, not for you specifically.
00:41:34.200You do a nice job of talking about these sorts of generation ships as these closed ecological
00:41:40.860systems. And then somewhere toward the end of the book, or maybe it was in the acknowledgements,
00:41:46.920I don't remember, you know, you, you point out, well, you know, this is a closed system too here
00:41:52.940on earth. And, and, you know, these, these systems, our activities throw them out of whack
00:41:59.160the same way that the characters in that book end up having to deal with that happening
00:42:03.860on their ships it was interesting to see such an ecological focus in an entirely artificial
00:42:15.140ecology in the book i i think that i think this is obvious from that book that i think
00:42:20.400generation ships are a fantastic metaphor for our planet um you know it's that it's that that
00:42:27.340classic Buckminster Fuller idea of spaceship Earth, right? I think it would be, I think part
00:42:34.460of our problem in a global sense is that it is so hard for us to understand the scale of things
00:42:44.100and the interconnected nature of things. And that's just a limitation of our biology. Honestly,
00:42:50.800we're just animals. We're probably not smart enough to be able to grasp everything the way
00:42:57.720we want to. And I think it would, in a lot of ways, be easier to have the sort of focus that
00:43:05.780the people in that fictional culture do on resource management and on understanding that
00:43:13.640they do not have any more stuff coming from anywhere else. They're floating around in space.
00:43:19.080They do not get more metal. They do not get more water. Like this is what they have and they have to be able to reuse it. That is also true for us. We're just dealing with it on a scale that isn't as tangible. It's so abstract for us. You know, you can understand that extractive methods of producing construction materials or, you know, the raw metals we need for the technology we're using to speak right now.
00:43:49.080you can understand to a point that like, oh, this is finite. We can't just pull this out of
00:43:56.620the ground forever. We will run out. That's very different than looking in your pantry and
00:44:01.880understanding I don't have any more food. So that sort of shift in scale for me was a fun place to
00:44:11.320play in because it meant that I could, as you said, play around with those ecological ideas,
00:44:17.100but in a way that felt more instinctively easier to grasp.
00:44:23.700Have you read Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson?
00:44:28.140It is on my shelf, and I have so many books.
00:44:41.380is just about the only camera shot in my entire place
00:44:44.440where there wouldn't be books in the background.
00:44:46.380God, I mean, listeners can't see this, but you can see this stack of books behind me right now. Those are just mine. Those aren't even as anybody else's.
00:44:55.700I've got the same problem. There's so many. Well, the reason I bring up Aurora, though, and also Stan is a lovely guy. We've had him on the podcast. He's wonderful.
00:45:06.940But that book does such a nice job, I think, of articulating in the context of science fiction, like, exactly why generationships are such a – the word that keeps coming to mind for me is crime.
00:45:23.760And I'm going to spoil a scene at the end of the book. There's a moment where someone who has unexpectedly returned from a generation ship journey to Earth is at a public event with advocates of generation ships. And, you know, this person is saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't send more of these.
00:46:14.080and I mean this goes back to Manifest Destiny
00:46:15.760This idea of, well, we must leave, and it's some sort of sign of maturity, sign of a successful civilization or whatever. It's like, what if a successful civilization is just one that is able to live on a planet without destroying it? I don't know. I think that would count as a success in my book.
00:46:36.900Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. While we're on the subject of Generationships, though, I have to plug one of the lesser known works by, and maybe you've read this one, my favorite sci-fi author, probably full stop, is Ursula Le Guin, and I talk about her a lot on here.
00:46:56.400Yeah, yeah, exactly. And she, as far as I know, only ever wrote about Generationships once. It's a novella in her collection, The Birthday of the World. Do you know this one?
00:48:20.820There's never been one like her, right?
00:48:22.420But she's also wonderful to go back and reread, especially because reading her in my teens, there was a lot of it that I didn't quite get yet.
00:48:35.660Or at least I got in a way that was appropriate for me at the time, but then going back 10, 20 years later, it's like, oh.
00:48:43.440I knew about her for years, but I didn't really start reading her in earnest until I was in college. And then, you know, went back and reread some of these things years later and found, oh, I get a lot more out of the dispossessed when I'm in my, you know, say 30s than I did when I was 19.