>> Amy Draves: Thanks for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm so happy to welcome John
Scalzi back to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. He's here to discuss the latest in
his beloved Old Man’s War series, The End of All Things, or as I told him anything he would like
to talk about. He's an award-winning author and blogger and also writes nonfiction, short
stories and video games. He served as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America for several years and he is currently exec producing and consulting on several projects
in development for television including Redshirts, Ghost Brigades and Lock In. It’s my true
pleasure to have him here again. Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[applause].
>> John Scalzi: Thank you. I'm not sure exactly which one of these I'm actually speaking to, this
one or this one so I'm just going to basically stand right here, speak into your chest. One, thank
you, again Microsoft, for having me back. I was here a year ago and I had a lot of fun, so I'm
glad to be back. The other thing is is that I got a e-mail from my publicist yesterday that said
what was going to happen is that there was going to be a 30 minute moderated Q&A followed
by a Q&A by the audience, followed by the signing. And then I got here and they are like no.
We are not doing that at all. As it happens because I knew I was coming to Microsoft and I
wanted to actually do something that might actually be more useful than me just going ahead
and reading or something like that, I had actually had some thoughts about how Microsoft is
like science fiction, the science-fiction genre in a sort of larger sense. So I made some notes
while I was traveling yesterday to the West Coast and I'm actually going to give that
presentation to you now. It's super rough, but I swear it's going to make sense and it will be
awesome. What we will do after that is open up to questions which can include about the new
book which is the End of All Things which is the sixth book in the Old Man’s War series, stuff
about the movies and TV, videogame stuff. I think I mentioned to you that I had done a
videogame with Alex Seropian, late of bungee, so there is some DNA there or just whatever you
want to talk about and then we can go to the signing. But to begin, and let me shut off my
phone, because I know for a fact my wife will call me in the middle of things in the get very
awkward. One of the things that I have been thinking about when I was on my way here was
tech nerds and about science fiction nerds and that there is obviously a substantial overlap
between them and I realized that it's not just about the nerds, the people who create
programs, the people who read science fiction and the people who consume the sciencefiction. But in some sense the organizations that we're all part of, me with the science-fiction
genre in a general sense, you folks with basically this decades spanning tech giant. There's
enough history of both entities that in many ways I think there are parallels, similarities and
points of confluence, not just in what the organizations do, but the people who are involved
with them as well. I had an eight point list here that I am going to go into a bit about how I see
that Microsoft and science-fiction are very similar, how we are alike and in some cases have we
diverge. The first thing of how Microsoft and science-fiction are alike is we are everywhere.
This is not a surprise to any of you, but obviously for Microsoft you have Windows. You have
Office. You have Xbox. You have managed to penetrate into the number of places where you
have become part of basically common culture in a number of ways. Likewise, science-fiction is
in films. It's in television. It's in books and video games. It's in the largest films over the last 10
years, or actually, let's face it, the last 30 years, since Star Wars onward really have been Star
Wars. You have had The Avengers which are comic books but they are still science-fictional.
You have television shows like Battle Star Galactica or Sensate which is something that is on
Netflix. Books, obviously, video games, I think a perfect example has been Halo which has
really been something that has saturated the culture, not just in the sense of you started with
science fictional videogame. Moved onto television, it has a number of books associated with it
and so on. None of these, neither Microsoft nor science-fiction are without challengers. They
are not without issues and concerns, but nevertheless both of us are part of and entrenched in
the culture. Much of our common culture is based on or refers directly to each. Think of how
many times can quote a Star Wars film or Matrix or how many things from Microsoft, both
good and negative, the blue screen of death, is something that I short term for when things go
wrong. Sorry, we don't see it as much anymore, thank you Windows 10, but a lot of this is part
of the common culture. So fundamentally, Microsoft and science-fiction both have a large
installed user base. The second thing is they are both created by nerds and they are for nerds,
but they are not just for nerds. Here's something that I always tell people. I have been a film
critic for a number of years and every once in a while the nerds who get super excited about a
film. Serenity was a good example. They were like oh my God! Serenity is going to be Firefly
and we are so excited, or Scott Pilgrim Versus the World it was another one where everybody
just when crazy for it. Snakes on a Plane was another one as well. And you saw the nerds go on
the internet and we all got excited and we all freak out about that sort of thing and here was
the value of the nerds at the box office, $10 million, which meant that that was the opening of
Serenity. That was the opening of Scott Pilgrim Versus the World. Snakes on a Plane got like 17
million, but the idea is the same, that as excited as you can make nerds, as excited as you can
make them about something, sooner or later if you want something to be successful, you have
to drag in all of the rest of the world. Microsoft did a very good job with this. I remember
when Windows 95 came out and Windows 95 came out with a start me up campaign and they
did that thing where everybody had to, they made it to where you almost felt like you weren't
cool if you weren't installing an operating system. And honestly, how you pulled that shit off is
still amazing to me, but that was the point. It wasn't just talking to the IT folks. It wasn't talking
to the early adopters and cutting-edge people. You guys aren't doing UNIX. You guys were
doing Windows and you made it a thing that it had to be there, just in the same sort of way, for
example, Marvel doesn't make the Avengers movies just for the people who got the Avengers.
They made them, literally, for everyone. So by nerds, for nerds, but nerds are not either the
endpoint or in many ways the intended audience. They are meant to be, if they are going to be
successful all the way out with everybody else. Another thing we have in common is that both
of us, science fiction and Microsoft, have and I towards the future. And by the way, I realized
that I am not actually from Microsoft, so you might be going here aren't too adorable. Right?
And it's okay. There will be a question and answer period afterwards, but I'm telling you what it
looks like from the outside and from the point of view of someone who is deeply entrenched in
science-fiction and who has been following Microsoft in one way or another since the 3.1 days.
So it's with an eye towards the future, but it is made today, which means that what we are
always trying to create both in science-fiction and in Microsoft is stuff that is new and that in
many ways is cutting-edge, but quickly heads towards obsolescence. There is always kind of an
expiration date to the things that we do. I know that you have just said that Windows 10 will
always be constantly updated and all of that sort of stuff, so we won't see Windows 11 for
Windows 12 or something like that, and I know you believe it. [laughter]. But the point of it is
that something comes out. It is new and very quickly although the feature sets become
standard or the tropes become standard in science-fiction and fantasy and then 10 or 15 years
later the things that were these amazing cutting-edge things are things that no longer impress
anyone. I think about it in science-fiction when I think about the golden age of science fiction
where you had Heinlein and you had Clark and you had Asimov and Henry Beam Piper, for
example, who wrote Little Fuzzy. And all of these books still have great ideas and all of these
books are still super interesting to read and all of them, oh my God, are so dated because of the
way that they have relationships between men and women, the way that they have sort of the
world view which is, you know, the competent man shall lead us. And strangely enough the
competent man tends to be white and tends to be straight and all of those sorts of things. And
so you look at these futures and you realize there was a divergent path where in science-fiction
that future happened just not in the universe where we are today. And it's not to say that that
was a better future and we missed out. I think the future that we have, the way that people are
writing science fiction now is in many ways much more inclusive and in many ways a better kind
of world then we would've gotten if we had continued to bond with the golden age of science
fiction. In the same sort of way, I remember installing Windows 3.1 for the very first time and
this was so easy. And if you look at Windows 3.1 now or even Windows 95 you're just like why?
Why do you want to torture me so much? Why is this so awful? So science-fiction and the
Microsoft products right and important and useful in their time, but they are, despite being
forward thinking, definitely of their time. What that means is that there is a tension going on
with the work both in technology and I think with Microsoft and also in science-fiction because
we have that tension of while we are doing stuff that is taking place in the common time and
we know what works and we know what we're doing with that and we know that our readers
for our users like that, but we also know that we need to continue to innovate and we need to
continue to do new things because obsolescence is literally around the corner. Windows and
Word had their many iterations over the years because in many ways you take what you know
and you just refine it and you do it one way or another so that people don't feel like they are
being pushed too far out. In the same way science-fiction loves its series, and its reboots and
its remakes, when you take the stuff that you already know that the people know. We're on
reboot number three of Spiderman. They are, God help them, thinking of another reboot of
Battle Star Galactica, this time is a movie. I just read today Zorro is getting a dark and gritty
reboot [laughter] that's going to take place in the future. And you think about it. As much as I
actually aesthetically from a visual standpoint like the new Star Trek movies and stuff like that,
again, it's retreading the stuff that we have already known. And I can't criticize too much. I
mean, hold that book up, Sir. Book 6 in the series, right? This is my latest iteration of a thing
that I know that people love, anything that I know I am going to sell a lot of copies of because I
know, again, my installed user base is going to be very happy that they have that there. This
isn't actually a question of obsolescence. This is a question of stagnation versus innovation. If
the only thing that I was doing with my career was writing Old Man’s War books one after the
other after the other, in many ways that would be very comfortable and I would make a good
living out of it and all that sort of stuff. But in another way I would be stuck in a rut. In the
same way, people, Microsoft has successful products. And if all you do is just continually refine
instead of pushing an edge, then you run the same risk. It's the stagnation versus innovation.
Stagnation is easy, but it has eventually diminishing returns. Innovation offers opportunity, but
it carries an immense amount of risk. And point five, sometimes that ambition outstrips the
interest or willingness to change from the people who are getting your stuff. Let me speak
personally to this with one of your products. [laughter]. Actually, I have two. Back in the early
part of the 2000s, Bill Gates stood up with a laptop that he twisted around and made into a
tablet and I went ahhh. That was the most awesome thing and I ran out and I bought one of
your Windows tablets and, and… [laughter] and it was not all that because, you know, the rest
of the world did not follow Microsoft at that time into the tablet metaphor. So I loved it. I was
like, hey guys, watch this, twisted around and they were like are you a wizard? [laughter]. So
that was great for me. It made me feel like I was really sort of on the technological edge, but as
it turned out there didn't end up being a lot of software that would address it. There wasn't a
lot that you could do with it other than every once in a while use it to, and it had the little stylus
and they hadn't quite figured out the whole touch interface thing. And ultimately it ended up
spending all of its time in laptop mode because that was where it was the most useful. Six
years later everything has gone tablet for better or for worse. This thing completely goes
around and does that and now we are at that moment, but you guys were ahead of the curve
there and you are sort of left hanging. Another example of that for Microsoft for me was
Windows 8 when it first came out, because you guys went full in on the tablet metaphor for
desktops, right? And there were just a lot of people that freaked out about it because all of a
sudden this comfortable metaphor that had been going from Windows 95 all the way up to
Vista, all of a sudden you are like and chuck. Everybody was like, what do we do with that?
And I have to admit after playing with it for a day or two I went to one of those mod places that
allowed me a start button and I installed it because that was how I used my desktop. That was
functional for me. As it turns out, you have Windows 10 coming out. I installed it the day that
it arrived and that was much more intuitive. You and the rest of the world have finally caught
up to what you were doing and you kind of met in the middle. But that ambition to not just the
innovation sometimes put you out ahead and you get criticism for that or you find yourself
standing alone. In science-fiction there are lots of writers who are trying amazing things. They
want to make work and metaphors that they want to try and worlds they want to build and
readers get to them and their reaction is what? Because they are not quite there. A perfect
example of that in science-fiction would be a fellow who I am almost certain all of you know,
Philip K. Dick. Science-fiction today, both in film in many ways and in books and certainly in
television as well, is part and parcel the way that Philip K. Dick imagined it or the way that
people who then adapted Philip K. Dick imagined it. But while he was alive, despite the fact
that he won a Hugo for Man in the High Castle and was celebrated by his fellow writers, he was
mostly broke all of his life. He got to a point where Robert Heinlein bailed him out, cut him a
check, mailed him a typewriter, you know, and help him out. It wasn't until long after he was
dead… He died just before Blade Runner came out and didn't realize just how much he had
changed our present and our vision of the future. If you read some of his books, even now they
continue to be these amazing, challenging, dude you are so high I don't know what you are you
doing, but I want to follow this sort of experience. But at the end of the day, sooner or later
everybody caught up. But because he was an innovator, because he was the person who was
out there on the edge, he had a lot of failure points. Like I said, sometimes that innovation and
iteration leaves you out in the middle of nowhere and you have to wait for the rest of the world
to catch up with you. Here's the other problem. When we say you have innovated or Philip K.
Dick innovated and all of the sudden you are out there, it's not just you. It's not just your fault.
It's also humanity's fault and here's the fact. This is something that science-fiction and
Microsoft have as well. Both are always progressing. Both are always iterating and both are
innovating, but you are always stuck with Humans 1.0. What does that mean? What that
means is all of us are Cro-Magnon. Fundamentally, who we are as people has not changed in
100,000 years. Our software never gets updates, or if it gets updated it gets updated at a
galacticly slow pace or evolutionarily slow pace would be more accurate. You could take a child
from 30,000 years ago, give him his shots, [laughter] bring him forward to today and raise him
or her in the culture that we now live in and no one would confuse them or anything else than
another dude at Microsoft or another dude at a science-fiction convention or whatever. This
isn't a bad thing. Evolution runs on sufficiency. We are sufficient to be who we are in this
world that we created and all of these sorts of things, but it does mean that when you are
innovating, when you are trying new things, you have this bounded experience that you have to
work within, which is how people approach technology, how people approach new ideas. The
easiest way to explain this is the idea that when I was young and I started working with
computers and I tried to show my mom how to use the computer. She would just shut down
on it. She didn't know what to do. Nowadays, I am the tech support for my mother-in-law. She
is like how do I do this? And I try to walk her through it because it's so obvious to me because
I'm used to this tech metaphor and she doesn't get it. And I think that's because I'm smart and
stuff like that, but I'm starting to notice there is some tech out there both hardware and
software and apps that I don't understand at all. I am 46 years old and my daughter looks at
me, she is 16, like I am a complete idiot. I'm like what is the point of Snapchat? [laughter].
Isn't that what just taking photos is for? And then you can just put it on Twitter and they are
there and I don't understand. And she looks at me like I'm an idiot because she understands
the metaphor of Snapchat perfectly, right? Or Yik Yak or any of these other things that the kids
are playing with that I am just like, and it makes you feel like dammit, IRC was good enough for
me. [laughter]. I don't understand why they had to swap it out. I mean, isn't Twitter just IRC
with a slightly nicer interface or whatever? But you realize that what you are dealing with in
many ways is the human thing of eventually your plasticity to new ideas close down and you
become in a very sort of small sense conservative. You have metaphors that you know that you
like. You have metaphors that you know work for you and you don't want to mess with them.
You guys had a little of that like I said with Windows 8 when you put it out. You put out a whole
new metaphor about dealing with a desktop and people got hung up over the start button. If
you were to explain to people, you know you press that button and it pulls up all of the
programs instead of just this little box where you can type in whatever it was or whatever it is
that you were just using. It is much more functional. It's like yeah, but you took me out of
what I was doing because you popped up that whole page. They don't understand that from a
functional point of view the flow is almost exactly the same. It's like you changed it. I'm scared.
And I get it because like I said I switched mine back. It's like no. I can't hang with this. May be
the cool kids can to this, but not me. I am becoming progressively more small c conservative
with my tech and when I get to 65 I'm going to say I don't know why people want direct brain
implants, which will be irony coming from me. [laughter]. And meanwhile my grandchild will
be like they won't be saying anything because they will have a direct brain implant [laughter]
and they will just be uploading to whatever has replaced Twitter at that point. My grandfather
is so old. What is wrong with him? So this obviously still happens in science fiction both in the
sense that there are a number of people even now -- I don't know if you guys have been
following science-fiction recently. We've been having an argument going on in science fiction
about what really constitutes science fiction. Is it the sort of classical golden age-esque sort of
science fiction that has the confident, straight white man, or is it a more expensive thing? And
we have a lot of people who are very small c conservative about that and digging in their heels.
But it's not even that. There are also the things about, there are still science-fiction writers who
use typewriters. George RR Martin is famous for having these super old like almost 2 decade
old boxes that are running WordStar 3.1. And you're like why? And he is like because that's
what I used to write. And I get that because the very first thing I learned to write right around
the same time that PCs were really coming into their own. I started freshman year of high
school the same year that the first Mac came out. I can only write on computers. I can't do this
thing where, if I had to write on a typewriter I would throw myself out a window. But what that
also means is that because I got used to -- I'm not going to lie to you. One of the reasons that I
almost exclusively write novels in Word is because I get it. I have people who come to me and
it's like you should try Scrivener, and I look at Scrivener and I like, what and why and who would
do this to themselves? And my friends are like let me explain this. You have these hierarchy
things over here and then this comes over here, and it's like I just want to write. [laughter]. I
want to write. I want to write in Word because I understand Word. The scariest thing you guys
did to Word was put the ribbon on it. That was okay. I could handle that because, this is the
other thing which is that people like, you can write online or you can do all of this sort of stuff.
It's like do you have a thing where I can do indenting? Do you have a ruler bar? Do you have a
WordCount? Can I bold? It's like no. That's a distraction. No it's not. [laughter]. That's how I
write. But like I said I have become, because I always have been Human 1.0. I am becoming
the argument that innovation is not always greeted with flowers because that's just who I am. I
am getting that way and we all, when we innovate, have to recognize that we are still
addressing and we are still addressing and we are still talking to and still making tools for CroMagnons. One of the things about that, about the fact that we do both in tech and science
fiction use great ideas but we have to kind of slow them down for ordinary humans is that
tends to make us smug that we are somehow in one way or another more advanced or smarter
or have a better perspective than the ordinary mass of people. This is the other thing. I'm not
going to say just Microsoft here. I'm going to say tech in general, so you don't have to feel it's
just about you. But also about science fiction is the Humans 1.0 are inside the gate, right? Go
look in a mirror and you will see the Human 1.0, which is to say that nerds, both in tech and
science fiction, are no less susceptible to encroaching conservatism, less plasticity, susceptible
to the frailties and flabels of the human conditions despite our best efforts to think of ourselves
as otherwise. In science fiction back in the thirties and forties there was a book that was called
Slan and the book was, I'm trying to remember which science-fiction writer. I think it might
have been Olaf Stapledon, but I'm not sure. Bing it and it will tell you. But the thing about it is
it posited a mutation that allowed for superhuman people and the fans of the time totally
glommed onto that. They were like yes. That is us. There was a phrase that went out and was
called fans are slans, which meant that science-fiction fans and the people who wrote science
fiction because they came out of the science-fiction fandom were somehow inherently better
because they understood the world in a more rational way. As anybody who has actually been
to a convention at any time with nerds can tell you that is complete bullshit. The fact is just
because your future thinking and because you prize rationality does not mean that you are, in
fact, more logical or that you are able to employ this more rational thing. Fans are just as petty
racist, sexist and bigoted as any other group of people. We are more imaginative and ways of
rationalizing our racism, sexism, bigotry and exclusionary activities as anybody else ever was,
but the fact is that the end of the day that's who we are. In tech as well, that sort of technical
smuggery, as I like to call it continues as well. I mean, I don't need to outline to you the
arguments in tech about representation, about whether there are enough women in tech, how
they get responded to. Minorities, and gay, lesbian, trans folks in tech, how they kind of feel
like they are second-class citizens because the world was built both in technology and science
fiction originally on a foundation of straight white engineers. And we continue to see all of this
stuff continue to exhibit itself in impressively negative ways. Fake geek girls from a couple of
years ago where women who wanted to join the geek culture were like no, you have to submit
to a test to see whether or not you are geeky enough, and there's no way that you can win the
test. It was the nerd poll test, fundamentally. Gamergate, Jesus! Do we even need to go into
them? And science fiction and fantasy, the Sad Puppies, all of these are examples of nerd
entitlement and blindness and gatekeeping, which is all part of human nature. Again, we
continue to deal with the issues of sexism, racism and all of these things in general. The fact of
the matter is we have to learn to get over that, both in tech and in science fiction because there
is a great overlap. One of the things is that exceptionalism still means that we believe that we
are the people who are going to be on that utopian Seastead. We are the people who are going
to be in Galt’s Gulch congratulating ourselves about how awesome we are while the rest of the
world burns. And, in fact, no we are not. And that whole metaphor is completely wrong.
There's no point in living in a Seastead when the ocean has been killed. There's no point in
living in Galt’s Gulch when the rest of the world has collapsed and your capitalist system no
longer has an object to look at. Our engagement in the world has to reflect that we are all in
this together and both tech and science fiction really have a long way to go before we get to
that point. Finally, one of the things that I see, and again, I'm going to cast this more widely
than just Microsoft, although, I am going to bring it around to Microsoft, is science-fiction and
tech feed off of each other. Let me give you an example of this. Back in the 1920s the cuttingedge technology was radio. Radio and rockets and there was a guy named Hugo Burnsbeck
who created magazines that were tracking all of this sort of science stuff. Inside of those
magazines nerds were talking to each other in the letters section. From that came the
generation of writers who created the golden age of science fiction. That generation of writers
inspired a new generation of engineers and scientists who sent us to the moon and created
foundations of modern computing and the internet, all of which in turn inspired cyberpunk and
other second ways of science fiction including AI, which inspired engineers and computer
scientists to find ways to bring about computers that you can talk to like you talk to humans.
And thus, Cortana, kind of, but you kind of understand where I'm going with that, right?
[laughter]. One feeds off the other. We are constantly in conversation with each other.
There's a reason why way back when the Motorola Startac phone looked like a Star Trek
communicator, because all those nerd engineers wanted a communicator. They wanted to flip
it open and go I'm here at the bar. Where are you? [laughter]. That's who we are. Back-and-
forth back-and-forth back-and-forth. We live in a science fictional world, but science-fiction has
also been inspired by what the world is and what companies like Microsoft have made it today.
So as a science-fiction writer, the first thing I want to say is thank you for that. And also as a
science-fiction writer I certainly hope that some of what I do inspires you to continue to
innovate, to continue to make a world a much cooler place and to make me feel further and
further lost from technology as we go along. Thank you very much. And that's my little lecture
today. [applause]. That wasn't bad. We killed a half-hour, which means that we have about 15
or 20 minutes for question-and-answer. I'm going to say the same spiel as I say every time
when I do the question and answer thing. You can ask me anything. You can ask me about
books. You can ask me about TV and video games and all that sort of stuff that I'm also
involved with. You can ask me about social stuff that's going on in the world and within nerd
culture. You can ask me about my cats. You can ask me about my family. You can ask me any
question you want. I see you; you can be first. [laughter]. But do understand I will answer
every question, but do understand that the answer to the question may be I can't believe you
asked that question. You are a terrible person. Leave now and never come back. [laughter].
So as long as we're clear, questions, and yes, you may begin.
>>: Thank you. I would love to hear more about the TV shows that you are currently involved
with.
>> John Scalzi: Right now there are three TV series that are currently in development. One is
based off the Old Man’s War series but will go with the title of the second book, which is far
sexier called Ghost Brigades. Then there's Redshirts and then there is Lock In which is the most
recent book. All of those, as we like to say, the euphemism is they are in process, which means
they are optioned and just in development. For example, Old Man’s War they had a script and
they turned it into Sci-Fi because it's going to be the Sci-Fi channel that is going to do it and
they were like we have notes and so they went back and they did another iteration. We
continue to have notes and so we are going to bring in new writers and that's where we are
with that. They have new screenwriters. There got another six months to make it work and
we'll see what happens with that. Redshirts was at FX for a while. They turned in a script. They
had doubts. They went and did another iteration. FX passed on it and now they are shopping
around to other people who are doing TV. And Lock In is with legendary and as far as I know
that continues in the process. One of the things that I tell people, I mean you guys know how
development works, right? You know, you keep going and you keep going and you keep going
until it gets punted out and then you deal with it or it just kind of gets shelved. And the thing
with movies and television is there is a huge number of failure points. Somebody from the
network can decide it's not working. The producer can decide it's not working. It can be green
lit and then get pulled before it gets into production. It can make it to television and then get
pulled on the first episode. The way that I tell people is that the time to get excited about a
project of yours being on TV, is season three. [laughter]. Because then you know it has
survived long enough to give you residuals and that you can go to conventions and they will say
oh you are the guy who wrote the book that the television series I love is based on. And you
are like yes, that's me. You could buy the book too if you want. Oh, why would I do that?
[laughter]. With the Old Man’s War series the previous set of screenwriters and I, because we
are all also executive producers on the project, which means that we are in the loop and stuff
like that. But we were talking about the season three thing and we made a solemn vow, season
three, Teslas for everybody. [laughter]. So I'm still waiting for my Tesla. Yes sir?
>>: Will there be a return to Harry Creek and the Android Stream moral?
>> John Scalzi: The question is will there be a return to Harry Creek and the Android’s Dream
world, The Android's Dream being my third book, second book? It's a haze of drugs and sex.
[laughter]. The answer is I tried going back to it and I'm going to give you a spoiler. The book
has been out for 10 years. You guys can deal. At the end of the book Harry’s best friend is a
planet controlling computer and his girlfriend is the single richest person on the planet, which
means that his problems are solved, which means when it came time to write a sequel, what I
was doing was not writing a story, but I was creating scenarios in which he couldn't contact his
best friend or his girlfriend. And that's not actually a story that anybody really wants to read.
The thing is that I could have pushed through and continued and finished that and sent it out
and there would have been people who would have liked it and all that sort of stuff, but
fundamentally, here's the thing. I put out a book. And people like it and people hate it,
because people are going to think what people are going to think. But fundamentally, I know
that that book that I just put out was as good as I can make it. So when someone gives it a bad
review, I don't find. I love going to Good Reads or Amazon or wherever and reading my one
star reviews. They crack me up, right? [laughter]. Wow. You hated this so much you actually
had to go out of your way to tell people how much you hated it, things like this is the literature
of a man who pulls wings off of flies, which is an actual quote from a one star review, which I
love. [laughter]. But the thing about it is is that it's okay because I know I did as well as I could
and that. If I did something and I just kind of crank it out and it came out and there was a
negative review that specified the things that I knew were wrong, then that would eat at me
forever. So what I did is I got seven chapters into that thing and then I called my editor and I
was like this sucks. It's bad and I don't want to keep writing it. How about I give you a new Old
Man’s War book instead? And he was like that's fine. [laughter]. And that actually became
Zoe's Tale and it did quite all right for me. So there is a short story which was actually the first
chapter which is called Judge SN Goes Golfing, which is available to purchase. That is out there
so if you want something in that set it continues to exist. I would like to go back to the
universe, but I think I will have to go back with different characters because again, Harry's
problems are solved. Yes? Two questions.
>>: I have been pretty entranced by the overall concept of The Obin because they are an
organic species that were given artificial intelligence and then don't have consciousness, but
then their consciousness is bestowed artificially through hardware. How the heck did you come
up with that idea?
>> John Scalzi: For the folks I didn't hear the question, I have aliens called Obin who are
intelligent but they are not conscious. They are given consciousness through hardware and she
was like dude, where did that come from? Well thank you. I like it too. The question of
consciousness, you know, people innately associate it with intelligence, like they honestly
believe that there is a one-to-one correlation for that. I think that is in some ways an assertion
without evidence. Our sampling pool is far too small. We really have only one species that we
know is both conscious and intelligent in a particular way. And then it becomes a question of
where on the curve does consciousness slip out? Because at what point do we say all of the
behaviors here are simply heuristic or are simply genetic and have absolutely no involvement
with consciousness or decision-making in a sort of conscious way at all. I think it clicks in for
most people somewhere around frogs. You can imagine a frog having a personality, but you
can't imagine like a single fly having a personality or something like that. I don't believe that
there necessarily has to be a correlation between intelligence and consciousness. It makes
sense for us because we live in that particular metaphor, but it doesn't mean that you couldn't
have one without the other, that you couldn't have a consciousness or a sense of self without
substantial intelligence. I have a dog, right? My dog is genially dumb, but she is definitely her
own person. Same with my cats, same with a rabbit that I had, all that sort of stuff. So why
couldn't it go the other way? Why couldn't you have intelligent entities that are problemsolving but are not necessarily cognizant of their own sense of self outside of a heuristic
knowledge that they are a particular individual? So that's really where it came from, just
separating it out and knowing that in a larger sense they would be able to make Gestalt of
understanding that they are lacking something that other intelligent species have, which is this
consciousness and that they would have a desire for just like any of us have a desire for the
thing that we see that everybody else has that we lack. And so that's how that came about.
Your second question very quickly.
>>: I work for the Word team and I'm excited to hear that you use Word for writing your books
and if you would like to talk to us at some point about how you write and how you use Word to
write, so this is not a question as much as it is a statement. We would love to talk to you.
>> John Scalzi: Okay. That's fine. I would be happy to do that. Yes?
>>: Can you imagine a videogame in the Old Man’s War universe and what genre would it be?
>> John Scalzi: I think it would be like Angry Birds. [laughter]. [applause]. I mean, I will let you
in to a secret, that Old Man’s War in many ways was inspired by First Person Shooters in a very
specific way and let me give the example of the half-life. Gordon Freeman walking around with
a crowbar and a shotgun and a rifle and a rocket launcher and a whole bunch of those weird
alien things that shoot bugs. And as I'm playing it I don't care because I can switch between my
weapons and stuff like that, but I just imagine that Gordon Freeman actually in real life is like
trying to walk and just has this backpack. He is not jumping anywhere with 500 pounds of
hardware on his back, not to mention all the ammunition and the health packs and everything
else that poor bastard has to lug around, right? It's just not happening. So in many ways the
MP 35 which is the gun I create in Old Man’s War which on the fly fashions armory or weapons
out of nano biotic particles is a response to that. You have one gun. That one gun can be a rifle
or a shotgun or a flamethrower or shoot lasers and all of that sort of stuff, but it is one gun.
You know, your material pack for your arms is heavy, dense material, but it is just one block and
it builds it up on the fly. The waste heat helps to generate power for everything else and so on.
It makes perfect sense to me. So that being the case, it would make sense for me to say that if I
were going to do Old Man’s War, I would make it as a first person shooter and just be like see?
This is how you do it. This is how you do UI in real life with this gun in science fiction. You
already had a question.
>> Amy Draves: But I am online as well.
>> John Scalzi: Okay. Is that an online question?
>> Amy Draves: Yes. This is about the question about book that I keep forgetting. Slan, was it?
>> John Scalzi: Slan. A. E. van Vogt.
>> Amy Draves: And the other is how did Will Wheaton end up being the narrator for your Old
Man’s War?
>> John Scalzi: He is not the narrator for my Old Man’s War books. The question is how did
Will Wheaton become the narrator for my audio books. Actually, William DeFrey is the narrator
for most of my Old Man’s War books with the exception of Zoe's Tale and half of the End of All
Things and that is T. Gilbert. The reason that Will became someone is that Audible bought a
whole bunch of my books and then they said is there anyone that you live in particularly like to
have to the audio. And I said why don't you use Will Wheaton for two reasons. One is he is a
pal and I might as well throw a few bucks his way. You know. He could use the scratch. And
the other reason is Will and I grew up in the same area. He is only a couple of years younger
than I am and if you listen to how I talk and if you can imagine how Will talks you will notice
that there is a very substantial parallel between how the two of us talk. My friend Natasha
Cordis, I point to a friend of mine who I also went to high school with who is here right now,
was sitting with me and Will at one time when we were talking and going dude, dude, dude and
she was laughing her ass off because it was like listening in stereo. [laughter]. That said, Will is
a professional actor. He is much better delivering that sort of thing than I am, so when he is
reading my books he is reading them as I would read them, just oh so much better. That is why,
generally speaking he is the person who does my audio books. Question here and then
question here.
>>: First concert you went to, in your youth? The venue?
>> John Scalzi: It's so embarrassing. [laughter]. Okay. I'm going to tell you, but I was dragged
to it and I want that made clear. It's like 1984, 1985 and my friend says dude, we're going to go
to a metal concert. How awesome is that? We're going to go to a metal concert. And I'm like
14 or 15 years old going dude, I would love to go to a metal concert because I like metal. Why
not? So we go to West Covina which is in Southern California, a suburb of Los Angeles. I
assumed that we were going to go like to the Forum or something like that because that's
where Motley Crue has their concerts. And he's like no, no. It's going to be here. And so we
get out and it's a big warehouse church. And I am like why are we here? This isn't metal. And
he is like just you wait. And we go in and performing that night is Striper. [laughter]. And
Striper, for those of you who were not alive in the eighties or have blocked it out, which is a
perfectly reasonable choice, is a big hair metal band that played heavy metal for Jesus, and
there's nothing wrong with that, right? But it was just the incongruity because they came out in
this spandex that was all with stripes because it was like by their stripes you will know them,
some phrase somewhere in the Bible. But basically, they were just all glammed out, big poofy
hair doing this metal thing and singing about Jesus. And every once in a while they would like
to reach over and they would just chuck all whole bunch of New Testaments into the crowd
with Striper on the cover and people would fight so hard for those. And it's like I don't know
how Jesus would feel about this. So they actually survived for several years and got very
popular and stuff like that. That was my first real experience at a concert. Then after that my
next concert was Genesis during the Invisible Touch tour which was in some ways just as
regrettable, but not nearly as interesting to talk about. Yes ma'am?
>>: You have been very vocal about your stance on Gamergate. I think a lot of people stay
away. They don't want to kick the hornets’ nest. So can you talk about why you decided to get
involved? I decided to get involved for two reasons. One, because it's fundamentally screwed
up. I don't want to use the F-word here because it's going to be sent out on Microsoft and into
the world. It's just a really screwed up situation in general. And then there was the added
thing. They started going after Breanna Wu. I have known Breanna Wu for years. It was both a
philosophically and conceptually screwed up thing and personally they pissed me off.
Fundamentally, here's the thing, which is I was just today looking at something that someone
did, like looked at all the journalism about Gamergate and the argument that the Gamergate
people have given is that fundamentally it's really about ethics and game journalism. And
anybody who has two brain cells to rub together understands that this is a contemptible lie.
What it came down to was one guy broke up with his girlfriend and complained about it on
Forchan and then a whole bunch of sexist jerks decided that this meant that it was open season
on this woman and anybody else who got in the way. And it wasn't the first time. The stuff
with Anita Sarkeesian predates that stuff. This has always been that undercurrent, the belief to
some extent is fundamentally that if you are a straight white dude that you have a certain
status and that you have a certain arrogance and that you have a certain position in the world
that should be unassailable, but you don't have to do anything for. You just have it; it's
entitlement. And what happened is generation after generation of people who are not straight
white males, who are the women, who are the minorities, who are the gays and lesbians,
bisexuals and trans folks progressively over time got less and less tolerant of having to put up
with crap to participate in a culture that they loved. And we have reached, thank God, a critical
point where women, in particular, but everyone else as well is just saying no. This is bullshit.
This is bullshit and we shouldn't have to take it anymore. The thing is that the larger argument
has already been won, that in many ways that it is absolutely uncontroversial in videogames
that women constitute the largest single segment of people who are purchasing games, ever so
slightly more than dudes, but still larger. It is uncontroversial, the idea that harassment is
wrong. It is uncontroversial, the idea that there are other valid perspectives then the straight
white man. It's done. This argument is done, but when you live inside this little bubble, you're
the last to know and so this has been the loudest, most obnoxious juvenile childish rearguard
action in the recent history of man. It's aided by the fact that the internet allows a very loud
and frankly a moral minority of people to cause a lot of damage on the way out. One of the
reasons it bothers me, like I said is it both philosophical and personal. Speaking again as a
straight white man, I am utterly un-threatened by the idea that people who are not me
participate in my culture, have valuable additions to my culture, make my culture better and
are my equal. This is just absolutely noncontroversial to me. I mean, duh. Apparently, this is a
hard thing for some other folks. For me, you know, just philosophically having that thing is not
a problem to do. But the other aspect of it is quite frankly, when you go after people for the
mere act of speaking when your action is to silence them so loudly and completely, then the
people that do have power I feel in many ways have to do that. I am male. I am straight. I am
white, fucking rich, you know. I am all the things that these dudes want to be and aspire to,
which is why it is important for someone like me to say this is bullshit and it needs to stop.
[applause]. Now ironically, the response to a lot of this is to try to minimize me in some
particular way. It's like he's not really a man. He's a gamma rabbit. [laughter]. Or whatever it
is, but I can't be demoted. I really can't. And so that's the thing. Now that flipside of this is
that I am an imperfect messenger for this sort of stuff, right? For example, two years ago or
three years ago now when I said I won't go to conventions that don't have concrete harassment
policies, and all of a sudden a lot of conventions started developing their harassment policies.
Meanwhile, all the people who had been arguing for harassment policies just kind of looked
really? Why are you listening to him? In helping to deal with the problem I exemplified the
problem as it was. I'm the first to admit it. There are things I'm going to get wrong. There are
things I'm not going to prioritize that other people will. That said, at the end of the day if not
me, then who? So that's why I do it. Not just with Gamergate, but also with the stuff that is
going on with the Sad Puppies and science fiction and all the other places that I know where
people are just doing damn fool stupid things because they are scared of everybody else in the
world. There's nothing to be scared of, absolutely nothing at all. And on that note, sorry, I
know a lot of you will have to give back to things and I want to be able to sign your books. We
are going to have to finish up the question and answer. So thank you all so much for coming
and somebody will come and tell us how we are going to do this signing thing. Thank you.
[applause]