The History of Science Fiction with professor and author Adam Roberts

Dinosaurs are real, which is exactly why they are so hard to write. Humans never lived alongside them, so any prehistoric fiction that wants characters, conflict, and drama has to cheat time, bend geography, or invent new science. I’m joined by Adam Roberts, professor of nineteenth-century literature at Royal Holloway and a leading critic of science fiction, to unpack how writers solve that problem and what those solutions reveal about our fears and fantasies.

The Book List:

Jules Verne – Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Lost World
Edgar Rice Burroughs – The Land That Time Forgot Trilogy
Ray Bradbury – A Sound of Thunder
Anne McCaffrey – Dinosaur Planet
Harry Adam Knight – Carnosaur
Michael Crichton – Jurassic Park / The Lost World
James Gurney – Dinotopia
Greg Bear – Dinosaur Summer
Robert T. Bakker – Raptor Red
Stephen Baxter – Evolution
Ethan Pettus – Primitive War
Lee Murray – Into the Mist

Guests

Adam Roberts
@adamroberts.bsky.social
https://profadamroberts.substack.com/

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Transcript

Welcome And Season Setup

Roland 0:25

Hello and welcome back to The Pirates Don't Eat the Tourists, and I'm your host, Roland Squire. This season, Stones to Stories, we're tracing prehistoric fiction from the Victorian fossil hunters through to the self-published novels of today. To help frame the whole season, I'm joined by someone who has thought more carefully about the history of science fiction than almost anyone else. He's professor of 19th century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and prolific author and editor of science fiction stories. He has also written the field's most critical study of the genre in the history of science fiction. Please welcome to the podcast, Adam Roberts. Adam, thank you so much for joining me today. How are you? I'm very well, well, and thank you for inviting me.

Adam Roberts 1:09

This is going to be fascinating to talk about this stuff.

Making Dinosaurs Meet Humans

Adam Roberts 1:12

Because it is now I'm I'm a man of mature years, but I'm still basically at heart a kid, still love science fiction, still love dinosaurs. I'm sure you're the same.

Roland 1:21

Yes, very much so. I sent you the list. Looking at those names on there, what would you take away from the range of authors on on that list?

Adam Roberts 1:29

I mean, there's a lot you could say about the the kind of trajectory of of pre-history and the way it filters through down into culture. So it the reason we're starting in the 19th century is because this is the great age of fossil discovery and piecing together the kind of long duay history of the planet. And I think you're probably right. I think Jules Verne is the one of the earliest examples of a dinosaur fiction. But then through the 20th century and up to the 21st century, the there's a fundamental problem, which is that from quite early on people came to understand that dinosaurs and human beings had never coexisted on the planet. So if you want to tell a story that is more than just paleontology, you have to put characters in there. And that means you need a twist, you need dinosaurs to be resurrected, as in Jurassic Park, or you need people to go back in time, as in the Ray Bradbury story, or you need to find some other way of putting those two things together. And I think what interests me about it is the way what is a much older probe, if I can call it that, of dragons and monsters that goes back into the history of fantasy and and medieval romance and so on, gets kind of f uh superseded, I was going to say, but actually dragons are still very popular, aren't they? But there's something similar going on with the fascination that science fiction writers have with dinosaurs, except that it's grounded in reality. These were real in inverted commas, dragons. No, they're real, not in inverted commas, dragons in inverted commas, but they were actually real. I'm not a dinosaur truther. I think they were actual dinosaurs, that's what I think. So there's so there's several layers to that to answer your

Hollow Earth And Deep Time

Adam Roberts 3:13

question. First, which takes its I think takes its cue from Jules Verne. So in the Voice to the Centre of the Earth, characters explore these subterranean caves and they go deeper and deeper into the earth, and Verne styles that as going further and further back in time until they stumble out into this large subterranean, hollow earth world, which is still inhabited by dinosaurs. And there's there's something of that that Edgar Rice Burroughs was interested in the idea that the Earth was hollow and that if he went inside the earth it would be a kind of primitive version of the Earth. A sense in which dinosaurs are there to represent the the deep kind of ancient history of the planet. But then I think what you get later on and uh interested is why it would be that in the eighties and the nineties there was a sudden a kind of resurgence of interest in d in dinosaur stories. Thinking of things like Harry Harrison's West of Eden, which is an alternate evolution narrative where the d dinosaurs haven't died out and have evolved into intelligent, kind of civilized within reason creatures, but also Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel, which is 1990, and then of course the Spielberg movie, which becomes this enormous hit. Suddenly dinosaurs are all over everywhere in the nineties, and there've been multiple sequels to Jurassic Park at the at the end of that century, which are more, I think, about about science and about the possibilities of science and and resurrecting these creatures so that you can tell monster stories. And I'm not sure what was going on in the in the nineties that meant that dinosaurs came back in such a big way.

Roland 4:47

No, I don't know. There was a yeah, there's definitely dinosaur renaissance at the kind of midpoint of the eighties.

Adam Roberts 4:54

Yeah.

Roland 4:54

I'm I'm yeah, I'm I'm interested. I'll I'll dig into that this this series, see how the pop culture sort of is the reason for for that resurgence in that time, what was going on at that time. It'd be interesting to find out. I was wondering whether you could give us a sort of brief description of what we're talking about of science fiction, what what what are the key touchstones that make a book science fiction?

Adam Roberts 5:17

So the

What Makes Science Fiction Work

Adam Roberts 5:18

the one standard answer to that would be to say that a science fiction story, uh I mean this definition kind of also encompasses fantasy, and sometimes people bracket the two together as fantastica as a kind of broad term. Science fiction stories include elements in the story that aren't in our actual world. There are lots of novels which you could call mimetic fiction or realistic fiction, which are set in versions of our world that are recognisably so. For science fiction or for fantasy, you have to have what the the critic Darko Suvin is a very eminent critic of science fiction, calls a novum. And novum is just a Latin word for new thing. So the novum could be a a piece of technology, it could be a time machine or an interstellar spacecraft or an advanced robot, or it could be some conceptual in Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, the novum is a society where gender is entirely fluid and people can swap between male and female, but it's a way of rethinking our assumptions about the world. And that I think is the as is the heart of it. I mean, there are also the novums in fantasy are more likely to be magic and uh kind of traditional looking back into the the past, whereas the novums of science fiction often are futuristic and looking to the future, but then we're talking about dinosaurs, and there's nothing more deeply embedded in the past than dinosaurs. So in the in in a in a book like Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton's novel, the novum is that this new technology which is able to resurrect DNA that's been preserved in amber and and splice it and make new dinosaurs out of it. But at the same time, the novum is the fact that we have dinosaurs again, this very ancient form of life comes back. So I mean it it's it's a way of thinking about science fiction. There's another way of thinking about science fiction which is to see less in terms of what happens in the story and more in terms of what place science fiction has in the the kind of larger history of culture. So we

How Sci-Fi Became Visual Culture

Adam Roberts 7:16

say, well, when does science fiction begin? Brian Aldis said the first science fiction novel was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. So that's 1818. And the science fiction becomes a big deal through the nineteenth century. We're talking about Jules Verne, we could mention H. G. Wells, and then explodes in the twentieth century. And that's again probably not coincidental. There may be a reason why dinosaurs came back into fashion in such a big way in the last decades of the twentieth century, but I think there certainly is a reason why the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries saw this explosion of interest in science fiction, because this is when industrial revolution and technological advances changing society very rapidly, everything is kind of being made new, and that puts you into a forward kind of frame of mind where you're thinking what's the next change going to be? What you know, the Apollo mission was an amazing technical achievement, but it also casts our imaginations out into the into the cosmos, and we can tell ourselves stories about travelling to distant worlds and distant stars. So by that reasoning, the way to think about science fiction, and I the reason I mention this is because it it really interests me that there are so many dinosaurs in science fiction. We think about science fiction as inherently a modern form of literature and culture. And what I say, you mentioned my history of science fiction, thank you for that, and I expect to sell millions more copies off the back of your kind endorsement. One of the arguments I make in that history of science fiction is through the 19th and 20th century, written science fiction, often in the form of short stories, but sometimes you know in the form of novels, was it was popular but but not in a in a fairly small way. It had a kind of dedicated fan base of people who would read these stories and go to science fiction conventions. And that was great. And then with George Lucas's Star Wars 1978, everything changes, that's such an enormous blockbuster success. And then all the sequels to that movie through the eighties and nineties and the alien movies and Terminator and and The Matrix and Avatar and all these huge visual texts, and that I think is the key thing. The science fiction shifts a bit from being primarily a literature of ideas and about written stories to being a a literature of the visual spectacular on the on a big screen, on television and video games. And in that latter form, it becomes a global culture. So now if you if you draw up a list of the top twenty highest grossing movies of all time, they're basically all science fiction or fantasy, except for Titanic. Titanic is is not science fiction or fantasy, but it is still a movie of the visual spectacular, it's these amazing special effects, and it takes you to a place that you can't imagine otherwise being. But the people who try you know traipsed to go and see all the Avatar movies are entering into a new amazing world, full of drakens again, but in bright colours and high and fast and high advanced technology that is thoroughly immersive but is very visual. So I'd say two things there very quickly. One is that as as a writer of verbal text, as a writer of written science fiction, part of me thinks, well, if only if only a tiny fraction of the people who went to see Avatar bought my novels, I'd be rich beyond the dreams of races. But they don't. And the people do still read science fiction, and obviously we still write science fiction, but that is kind of small scale beside what's happened. And that r relates us back to dinosaurs, I think, because one of the things we have to say about dinosaurs is they're just very big.

Verne And The Pleasure Of Travel

Roland 10:39

Just starting Journey to the Centre the Earth for the first time and just just loving it, just loving the adventure of it. And I was wondering whether he was an early entry point to science fiction for you.

Adam Roberts 10:49

I think I worked back to to Verne. And I think I started reading as a kid all the uh all the golden age and new wave science fiction that was around in paperback form. And then I fell in love with H. G. Wells. And people often link Verne and Wells as if they're the two kind of grandfathers of science fiction. But actually, Verne was a generation older than Wells. He was uh publishing in the 1860s, whereas Wells doesn't get going into the 1890s. But then when I discovered Verne, there's this it's so fascinating. There's so much of what he does is uh pays through into science fiction.

Roland 11:24

I I really like there's there's a quote in your book from Thomas D. Clarison, who sums up Verne's novels as being, you know, about a man of reason who journeys to some exotic destination and then experiences a series of largely disconnected adventures. And I just think that's such a brilliant quote. And exactly what I kind of it there is it's like a tree, he's so much interested in that adventure and the journey of it, rather than uh I don't know, the the the destination, I suppose.

Adam Roberts 11:56

Yeah, and the the kind of collective title for the Verne adventures are the Voyage Extraordinaire, extraordinary voyages. And he himself, when he became famous and rich enough, bought himself a gigantic yacht and used to sail around in it, and that was what he enjoyed doing. And you're right. I mean, one of the things that's interesting about Verne in the science fiction context is how rarely he goes into space. So he does have uh an adventure where he sends a small crew to the moon, they get fired out of a gigantic cannon in Florida, but they don't land on the moon, they just fly around the back of it and then come back to Earth. And he has a very strange later adventure called it, Echtos Sovedak, where a comet smashes into the earth and breaks off a huge chunk of the earth that then flies out into space. And improbably the people living on that chunk of Earth, it's a bit of North Africa, and they're they survive. They go and hide in caves, and they're all right, and they go on this kind of tour of the solar system, doesn't make an awful lot of sense. But Verne wrote dozens of novels, and almost all of them are voyages under the sea with Captain Nemo in his famous submarine, or around the world in 80 days, or five weeks in a balloon, and it is about just traveling. And I think the appeal of that is partly, again, the late 19th century, at a time when very few people had the opportunity to travel. There were no up-price airlines, there were no package holidays. You would mostly just stay where you were. You were born, live, and die in the same small location. And there was something very exotic and exciting about these adventures where you could go all around the world. And I think that's one of the things that makes voyage to the center of the earth stand out, is that it's not just a voyage through space, although that's they do descend through this these volcanic caves in Iceland and they go down and they discover this kind of hollow earth, this giant sea with dinosaur icleosaurs sporting in it. It's a journey back in time as well. So it's a it's partly to do with the that there's a Viking who's supposed to have where up. I don't want to spoil the story for you.

Roland 14:03

No, I've I've I've I've read it, I read it really quickly, because I was sort of trying to savour it, and then no, I just ended up just just believing it.

Adam Roberts 14:09

It is great. But there's the all the way through they keep seeing the the rune of this Viking who's preceded them, even though he was, you know, it's a thousand years earlier and he somehow found his way down there. And that that's that's one layer of history, and then you get into this subterranean realm, and that's another layer of history. So again, that's I mean, uh this the the subterranean world idea is is actually quite an ancient one. Uh there's a a a Danish writer called Ludwig Holberg in the 18th century who wrote about a hollow earth that you can sort of get to. And there was a an American called John Sims, S-Y-M-M-E-S, who who posited that the hollow earth is real and said you can you can get there if you just go up to the North Pole, which is before the North Pole had been reached. If you go to the North Pole, you'll find a big kind of hole there, and you just go through and you're in the hollow earth. And it was widely believed, and people, you know, there were bills passed in Congress to fund an expedition to take us into the hollow earth. The thing that makes it different for Verne is that for most people imagine the Hollow Earth to be a place where an advanced civilization, a utopian world. But as Verne said, no, no, to go underground is is kind of to go back in time and to to get further and further away from modernity. And that is really quite striking. But it is, I mean, it's also you're right, it's just really a really well-told adventure. So is this the first verm that you've read?

Roland 15:32

Yes. I mean, to say that this so I listened to a cassette recording of like an audiobook of Journey to the Centre of Earth when I was much younger. And it was heavily abridged, and there was this like classical music that played every about five seconds. Yeah. I can see why kids like love it as well. And

Conan Doyle And The Lost World

Roland 15:54

that sort of leads me on the next person on the list, which is Arthur Conan Doyle. Yeah, like both both Verne and Doyle just seem to be from the perspective of isn't this just a jolly adventure sort of thing, rather than uh kind of what I think of as science fiction later on.

Adam Roberts 16:12

There, I mean there's there's no shortage of jolly adventures in later science fiction, but you're right, it's it can seem a little uh a little single-minded, I think, the way these things work. I mean, Conan Doyle is a really interesting writer because he's most often associated with Sherlock Holmes, it's best creation, had nothing to do with dinosaurs at all. And he became tired of the fact that Holmes was his most famous creation and wrote all sorts of other stuff. He wrote historical novels. He wrote The Lost World, which comes out in 1912, which is which breaches that problem of of how we put dinosaurs and humans together by imagining this hidden valley where dinosaurs have never gone extinct, that humans eventually break into somewhere in South America at a time when I mean I suppose it was a time when it was still possible to set an adventure that way because the world had not been kind of thoroughly explored. There comes a point in the 20th century when we simply know too much about our home planet to be able to imagine that there are secret nooks and cracks and dinosaurs still there. But it is it's fun and it's a jolly adventure.

Roland 17:19

With Arthur Conan Doyle and then the next person, Edgar Rice Burroughs, they're writing in the pulp era of science fiction. So tell me a little bit about the importance of that at that time for the genre.

Adam Roberts 17:31

So

Pulp Magazines Change The Genre

Adam Roberts 17:32

it's it's what it's the first kind of big expansion of readership. And the readership comes about for two reasons, not to be too dry and social historian about it. But one is that it's at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, that literacy levels start to really take off because you uh education becomes required by law. Everyone has to go to school, everyone learns to read. So there are lots of people who can read. And the pulp magazines, which had the advantage of being really cheap because they were printed on cheap paper that was made from wood pulp. That's where the name comes from, and they had garish bright covers, coal-tar dyes that caught the eye, were pitched at this new readership. So they they weren't, it wasn't sophisticated poetry or philosophy, it was exciting adventures for just for ordinary people to read. And it was a very successful form of publishing. So there were science fiction pulps, there were noir pulps and crime pulps and Western adventures and romance pulps and all sorts of things. I mean, it's really interesting to me that it was I mean, you still get all through the century, you get magazines dedicated to crime stories or to Western adventures. But it is science fiction and fantasy that comes to dominate the pulps through the 1920s and the 1930s. And that that I find that very interesting, right into the 40s, and they don't die away until later in the in the century. And they die away in the 50s in part because cinema becomes a much bigger and more spectacular deal when you get widescreen, full colour movies that attracts people, but also because novels start to take off, cheap paperback novels start being published. People buy those instead of buying the magazines. But you're right. So then writers like Edgar Ice Burroughs, again, he's most famous for Tarzan, and there are several Tarzan stories where Tarzan encounters dinosaurs. What's interesting there is some of them are because Tarzan lives in quote-unquote darkest Africa, so it's still a place where, to Western sensibilities, it was kind of an unexplored territory. So you could imagine there might be all sorts of monsters and creatures lurking there. But also Edgar S. Burrows has a whole set of stories set in a hollow earth. And when you go into the hollow earth, his hollow earth is full of these sorts of kind of wonderful creatures. And then he wrote the the land that time forgot, which is a very strange narrative that was made into a film in the 1970s. I remember going to see it in the cinema in the 1970s and being a bit puzzled by it, actually. Have you read that?

Roland 20:19

Yes, I've read I read that a couple of years ago because growing up, grew up when Jurassic Park came out, and then I think my parents were just trying to find anything else that was darkness or related. And so that that and that was on like BBC Two, like on a Sunday afternoon, they'd show the Doug McClure films, and they're just they're fantastic fantastical bits of uh yeah, British filmmaking from the 70s.

Adam Roberts 20:42

I know, and the special effects are on on the one hand, it's a bit like early Doctor Who. The one hand, they're they're kind of cheap and a bit chunky, but weirdly effective. And they they hold up in a way that more quote unquote sophisticated special effects from the eighties and nineties now look really, really dated. Whereas this is it is kind of models and and puppets and terra pterodactyls flying through the sky menacing you. But it does work very well, I think.

Roland 21:11

It's uh and I I for Egg Edgar Ice Burroughs reading him, it's uh it's it's interesting that he seems to be taking it pretty much all from Arthur Cohn and Doyle, but he loses that I d I don't know, the sense of fun. It's sort of it's it's uh like it's still an adventure, still a romp, but uh essentially every time they come across anything, they just shoot it. And the kind of at least with Verne and with Doyle, they're still trying to think of the science science, even if it's just as a way into the story. I think with Burrows he's uh he's made the science in his head and he will then it will just write about it or take what other uh fiction authors have written and use that as the basis rather than uh yeah, I don't know, periodicals or you know, journals of of the time.

Adam Roberts 22:02

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean one of the things that distinguishes Bernard is that he's he's very scrupulous about including as much actual science and descriptions of the natural world as he can because his books were aimed to be educative as well as entertaining. And that was partly why they sold as widely as they did, that people would buy them for their kids and the kids were supposed to be 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an exciting adventure about an advanced submarine, but it's also full of all the by the 1860s standards, up to date knowledge of marine life and ecosystems and that was that was something that that's also true of Wales to a large extent. Sometimes Wales is it's just fantastically extrapolative, but often he grounds what he he wants to write in his understanding of science and the possibilities. I think with pulps a lot of that goes out the window. The aim is to is to be thrilling and exciting. And dinosaurs amongst other things become you know as as with kind of aliens or uh robots become they become a trope they become something of a caricature and we kind of know what we're getting. And it is to do with the monstrosity of them and the scale of them and the threat of them. That leaves kind of science behind.

Roland 23:13

I was looking at the bridging the gap between Edgar Ice Burrows, that's kind of first world beginning of the First World War, end of the First World War sort of era and then the next person on my list is Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury Time Travel And Anxiety

Roland 23:28

And that story is then in the nineteen fifties. So it's that it's that gap. I'm trying to find the authors within that space but I think they seem to be looking at obviously the anxieties of the time and that was the nuclear war and Cold War that came out of it and so I think eyes went elsewhere and things like dinosaurs, things like they were too passe maybe too done. And so the new terror was was was nuclear fallout does and this is sort of what the main idea of this whole series is is that dinosaurs and fiction and in science fiction are there as our anxiety for our place on or you know our place within time, our place on the planet. Science fiction does do does it have to always be about that sort of anxiety of of us of as as as humans on on the planet and what we do it often is, isn't it?

Adam Roberts 24:26

But I think it also has a a utopian strain that sometimes comes through where you feel to mention Wales, although he didn't write about dinosaurs, which is thinking about it given how much he wrote he wrote it's kind of interesting. But Wales divides between sometimes he writes anx anxious dystopian books about how everything can go wrong but often he writes kind of awarding utopian books about how we're going to create a perfectly equitable world state and then colonize the stars and everything's going to be great. I mean the anxiety thing is just from a practical point of view if I speak as a the writer the problem with utopia is it's not very dramatic. There's no there's no conflict and so then if there's no conflict there's no drama if there's no drama there's no story. If everything is happy everyone's happy and everything's fine and there's no real story there. Whereas dealing with those sorts of anxieties I think is is key. And I think you're so in that post-war period one of the things that's going along I don't mean to complete to continually muddy the waters here by conflating science fiction and fantasy but there are an interesting set of dragons in the 1930s and 40s and in the early 50s and Tolkien the hobbit of 1937 had smog this giant dragon and he's not a dinosaur but he is a big threat and kind of anxiety producing. And there are dragons in Tolkien's mythography and then fantasy as a mode is getting going and dragons quite often appear there. But I think that is more conservative with a small sea that is more kind of historically oriented and backward looking. Whereas this is where we started isn't it dinosaurs are even more historical in one sense but in another sense they're kind of up to date. So the the novel the thing that makes Ray Bradbury's story science fiction is time travel. And the idea that you would commercialise that and you would send people back as tourists to explore the past but they have to keep on this I mean it's not it doesn't actually make a lot of sense if you try and think it through but it's it's dramatically it works very well that you can disturb the past by building this path that they have to walk on and sending people back there. But if you so much as I mean you can disturb the past by having people shoot dinosaurs as big game hunters but if you tr if you step off the path if you pet on a butterfly it will completely change what the future's going to be. I wonder why why how it works that way. Do you think he was trying to say something about game hunting at that for for that I do wonder about that because we're talking that's that is a kind of Egarice Burroughs or of its era thing. I know people still do go big game hunting but it's not kind of it's not acceptable anymore. There was a news a couple of days ago about how a big game hunter was trampled to death by an elephant and the social media were full of serves him right for going to shoot these beasts. And that I don't think that was the case. You know you read you read Ernst Ernest Hemingway and he's revolved in going out into Africa and shooting game. And I think you can imagine that if you're going to shoot big game that it's not going to come any bigger than Brontosaurus. The dinosaurs are at one end of that.

Roland 27:34

Yeah it's fascinating.

Adam Roberts 27:35

So we're in the sort of golden age of science fiction with Ray Bradbury so 1940 nine to nineteen sixty is that sort of the time where the literary that's I mean it it these these kind of categories are slightly artificial it's a a whole flux of continuity of lots of different kinds of text being produced but I think that that's certainly the narrative that critics and historians of science fiction talk about that the pulp era is from the 19 teens through to the 1940s. And from the 40s through to about the early 60s you get the golden age and it's a very loaded term isn't it? Still very famous writers um Isaac Asimov and Ray Ray Bradbury I think Ray Bradbury maybe is a bit more of a new wave writer but Robert Heinlein, Artist Clark, people doing kind of classic science fiction what people often think of as science fiction. And the thing that I love about science fiction, the thing that draws me to it as a writer and a critic is that you can do anything at all. You're really not constrained by the lineaments of actual reality to be in life you can go anywhere in the universe you can tell any kind of story you can have any kind of adventure.

Dragons, Pern And Dinosaur Planets

Adam Roberts 28:47

And I suppose the outlier on my list is Anne McCaffrey who you sort of think of as a I mean is she a fantasy author with with dragons that she was always very adamant that she was a science fiction author and she got a bit when people categorized her as a as a fantasy author. I mean the people call her a fantasy author because she her most successful series was The Dragon Riders of Pern, which is clearly about dragons and there are dozens of dragon novels that she wrote and they were hugely successful. And they're still very readable she would say no this isn't fantasy this isn't going back to a kind of medieval world which happens to include magic and dragon it's set on this alien planet called Pern. The dragons of Pern are alien beasts that happen to resemble dragons and they are able to breed fire because and she spells out the kind of chemical reasons that it's happened and we discover as it goes on that they've been what we say genetically modified we would say now but that's not the phrase she uses to to have these attributes because the the particular situation in this world of Pern is that these threads periodically come and kill all life and the dragons can fly around and burn up the threads with their fiery breath. So it's all rationalized and she was very again it goes back to what you're saying she was kind of careful to get the the science and the chemistry right and she consulted scientists and chemists to that end. That said I've read I haven't read all the dragon novels of Anne McCaffrey. I've read quite a few of them and they do read like fantasy. They are basically romance fantasy texts with those sorts of adventures and those sorts of things going on and you've got these wonderful dragons flying around in the sky. I mean it's the same with a dinosaur planet now that's not my favourite Anne McCaffrey novel I must say she's um she was born in America she was raised in America she her mother was of Irish extraction and in I think 1970 she divorced her husband and moved to Ireland and became a naturalised citizen of Ireland and lived the rest of her life in Ireland a long life but she was in some kind of financial straits so she wrote a lot and she pitched lots of ideas to lots of publishers the idea of a dinosaur novel to Futura the London based publisher and they said oh yes we'd like a dinosaur novel make it so that kids will enjoy it because that we think is going to be the market for this sort of a story. So it is what we would now call YA I suppose and not I don't want to spoil it for you Robin but the it's again it's set on a distant planet a planet called Irita where some explorers get marooned they get stuck there. It's slightly odd that it's presumably it's set in some point in Earth's future because we now have spaceships and we're exploring different planets and so on. The characters in the novel wander around and they see these alien creatures and they don't recognize that they're dinosaurs, although they are dinosaurs and you know that because the name of the novel is dinosaur planet. So they call them they there are pterodactyls and they call them gifts they they christen them this name and then there are there are tyrannosaurus rex tyrannosauri rex I should say for the plural and they call them fang faces and then about two thirds of the way through the novel it's like oh actually these are dinosaurs from Earth. And that seems it seems to be that they wouldn't recognize them. I mean then there's a there's a kind of explanation as to how it is that dinosaurs from Earth have been seeded on this alien planet. And that becomes part of the mystery of what's going on. And it yeah once it gets going it's perfectly fine. Slightly simplistic adventure story that's aimed at kids and it's from quite early on in McCaffrey as to her I'm not sure her is firing on all her cylinders as a writer. But then it's through the 70s she writes lots of other stuff and she starts to become famous and she becomes famous particularly for the dragon books which I think are doing similar things going to an alien planet and finding these comic creatures but telling more exciting stories. Yeah I don't and there was a whole series of Dragon Planet novels so they weren't a flop and they obviously reached an an audience but I don't think anyone would put them in the in the front top tier McCaffrey top tier McCaffrey or top tier dinosaur stories I don't know.

Roland 33:20

Yeah.

Jurassic Park Then Sequels And Kong

Roland 33:21

Well well I'm interested to see and then in the 80s late 80s eight eighty nine we get Jurassic Park which is the book the reason why this podcast exists when when when when did you first read it and what did you make of it?

Adam Roberts 33:38

So I I read it when it came out and I I read all of Michael Crichton and he's he's become a slightly more controversial figure because towards the end of his life he became a a climate change denier didn't he and he had espoused various views. But the two really significant things that he created I mean one of the things I the reason I read him was because I thought that I've forgotten the name of it the the theme park with the robots Westworld how can I forget that name I remember seeing Westworld like you say on BBC two late at night Yul Brenner playing the the robot gunslayer and I thought that was amazing. And I watched the Andromeda Strain which is a really effective science fiction thriller but these are both kind of scripted the ideas were Michael Crichton but two just fantastically influential things he did. One is because he was a his early career was as a what you would say of casualty an emergency doctor he conceived ER and ER became this enormous kind of phenomenon on the telly and it's now the pit is basically the ER reborn. And that's the one of the inheritances which is the kind of realistic side of of Mike Friton's experience. But he also just very adept at taking these ideas he's not the first person to write a dinosaur story is he but he just writes it really effectively. So in terms of how much paleontological accuracy there is at the heart of the novel there is this kind of hand wave and he's obviously done enough research to know that you can't simply pull strands of perfect DNA out of blood that's inside a mosquito that's inside a piece of amber that's been there for literally millions of years. It's not stepped out of time. So he has this you know then there's this system that we have that somehow resurrects this DNA and then we inject it into whatever they injected into I don't know carry forces chickens to create these dinosaurs. But that doesn't matter because he's hurrying us past that to get to the adventure itself and that's just really nicely paced. And then when the movie came out and the movie came out quite soon after I think so if the novel's 1990 the movie's 1993 I think that is one of the cases where although a lot of 1990s movies the special effects have not aged well I think they still hold up in in Jurassic part of the movie and you do get that sense of wonder and the sense of scale and you do get the way that it's not just about showing big dinosaurs on the screen rampaging around it's about hinting at them. It's about the sense of their coming and the the size and the scale and the danger of them and it's about the ripples and the little glass of water on the uh the shelf of the car that let you know that you can intuit this is something of a very large scale that's coming. So do you prefer the book or do you prefer the the movie?

Roland 36:35

I think you can have them both and enjoy them both in different ways. I'm I quite like how they're just they feel so different and yet when they come together and they did quite a few times it just Spielberg adds the heart which Crichton doesn't all always have his characters a little bit one-dimensional they're functional they they they're doing rather than Spielberg's who are moat.

Adam Roberts 36:59

No I think that's that's astute. I think that's exactly right actually but then the other thing to say about the Jurassic Park is that there's uh hundreds of sequels and a lot of them are no good. Sometimes there are sequences from some of them that you think okay but it's so I don't know why it was it's it's not possible to catch that lightning in a bottle again although they keep trying and I I think trying not just because Jurassic Park was a big box office success but because there's something about that that ought to work.

Roland 37:31

There ought to be another exciting eventure you can tell where human beings and these dinosaurs interact yeah and I think they've tried to you know through the Jurassic World films they've tried to make it bigger maybe and it expand upon Crichton's ideas about genetic modification even more creating mutations and that it feels quite Crichton in that way that maybe if there was a third book that that is sort of maybe what he would have gone down to but then in the late in the latest film Rebirth they've they've shrunk it because it feels like we're then going back to the era of Arthur Conan Doyle and Gnostic idea that in the mists or there is this island like King Kong that where these things still exist yeah all the yeah I mean King Kong is really interesting isn't it because that if we go back to the kind of hole in the narrative of 20th century dinosaur storytelling King Kong is a is a 1930s kind of text or work that is doing something similar.

Adam Roberts 38:34

It's doing something similar but not with a dinosaur it's doing it with a gigantic ape but it's has it's giving us the same sense of scale and the island that that King Kong is on is populated by these creatures that should have died out but they're preserved like like Conan Doyle's Lost World. But the the heart of King Kong is you don't just go to the island and have an adventure you bring Kong back and then you get him rampaging around New York. In the original film and in Peter Jackson's remake which is much longer. I mean that's partly I think one of the things that goes wrong with the the sequels to Jurassic Park is that the the assumption is well obviously we've got to get these these dinosaurs off this island and have them stampeding around small town America. That's where the excitement is and I'm not sure it is actually I'm not sure because I think the point about Kong is we do sympathize. We empathize with Kong wrenched out of his world and he's in this strange place and everyone's trying to scare him with flashbulbs and shoot him with biplanes and all he wants to do is just hang out with Fay Ray and it there's something there's a great pathos in that story. I don't think there is I don't think pathos is the is the idiom of Jurassic Park. I don't think that's I mean you're quite right about Crichton and his characterisation of there is something a bit countercalculating and told about his imagination. Whereas I think you're right, Spielberg has immense heart and he manages to put that through but I don't think we're we ever empathise with the Tyrannosaurus Rex in that movie. Or do we and maybe in some of the later movies.

Roland 40:08

The later films they try it's it's the same thing with any sort of villain. Yeah that it's if you have a villain around long enough it becomes the hero of the films like I don't know like Terminator always they whatever you were afraid of in ten years time, you know five films on it'll be the hero of the film.

Adam Roberts 40:28

That seems to be the trajectory of the and it also it's another example of a of a series that's diminishing returns the Terminator film because I love them. I mean it's partly the just that Hollywood thing that you can't leave one alone. You can't just say well made a perfect movie let's leave it there because there's so much money that you might make. So you don't just make the Matrix you have to make a repeated sequence of the Matrix where it all goes a bit um goes a bit wrong.

Roland 40:53

Yeah. Yeah. When so when Jurassic Park came out and then it almost sort of stops the dinosaur story again after like years of science fiction stories and then you have Jurassic Park and you feel like that should create a new wave. Yeah

Baxter, Evolution And Hard Sci-Fi

Roland 41:09

there's there's a few so I've managed to find Greg Bear he did a it's sort of a YA story of a continuation of Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World Dinosaur Summer. But the next one I found was the it's can contains dinosaurs is Stephen Baxter's Evolution which is a four which spans four billion years.

Adam Roberts 41:28

Yeah it's typically small scale Steve I mean I know Steven I love him but he does he does go for that. So we it starts 65 million years ago and it goes hundreds of million years into our future. But it's also just a series of I mean it's a really interesting novel. It's a kind of fixed up so that each of the chapters is a separate little short story set at a different period in history starting with creatures and a lot of the characters aren't really s sapient. They're not sentient they're just animals or pre-hominids or whatever that might be living their lives as best they can. And I do find it it's quite a depressing book in a way it does seem to be saying over and over again life is the same thing that you struggle and you you try and get food and you have sex and have babies and then you get eaten by a dinosaur or you you know you die and then just when civilization starts to pull itself together there's some enormous planetary catastrophe that wipes everybody out. And also that I mean in that sense one thing I mean I know Stephen he's he's a he's a great guy he's a great writer but he is a trained scientist and he takes that very seriously so one of the things that evolution does as a novel is it repudiates the idea that evolution is to use the jargon heliological. So that is a way of saying that in the 19th century especially there was a belief that evolution was kind of like a ladder that you start with primitive forms of life and they become more and more sophisticated. They arrive at us and we are kind of the pinnacle of life and actually Darwin is very particular that's not how evolution works evolution is a kind of chance and it's simply mutations that fit the environment are passed on. It has happened for us, you and I, that intelligence has enabled us to thrive as a species but there's no reason to think that's going to continue to be the truth. And in evolution Steve is very you know kind of ruthless in saying well no in this far advanced million years in the future evil intelligence would be a handicap rather than an advantage so that it's not that the creatures in the novel devolve. It's not like Wells is time traveler going into the future and finding Eloy and Morlocks. It's just that that's how evolution works, that the environment changes so the thing that fits you best to the environment changes and the later chapters in that novel are weird, tiny creatures that can barely think, that are still just trying to to survive and Part on this. But the scope of it is amazing. And he's done that in multiple novels, Steve Baxter. He's he's just he's unafraid to take on the longest possible time scale. Yeah.

Roland 44:12

Would is is that hard sci-fi? Because I've sort of been reading around the different genres. I'm not very well versed in science fiction as a whole. So it's been interesting reading your book. Very illuminating. And yeah, I was I keep coming across hard sci-fi, and I was thinking of this book, and I thought, does that fit into that sort of mould?

Adam Roberts 44:34

Yeah, and most of what Steve Baxter has written is hard science fiction. And by hard science fiction, really all we mean is that it obeys the laws of science as we understand them. So lots of the familiar fixtures of science fiction have no basis in science and are as impossible as a magic wand. Particularly faster than light travel. So there are lots of, again, hand waves in various science fiction texts that say, well, you get aboard the USS Enterprise and it engages its warp drive and it travels faster than light across the galaxy. There's no such thing. You can't travel faster than light. You can travel to distant stars, but it will take you hundreds or thousands of years, and then you have to accommodate that. And Steve is very good at doing that because he does know his science. I mean, again, I speak as a science fiction writer, but my background is in the arts and humanities. So I take a more flexible view of science. I'm interested in what the you know the story can enable interesting stories. And I don't think that that Steve Baxter is a fundamentalist about that. Some of his stories are able to explore, pull, and and uh squeeze the possibilities of absolute science. But he is, he does respect the science. And a lot of fans like that, and they like their science fiction to be to be hard science fiction. But yes, I mean, so this is not a story about magically bringing dinosaurs back to life so that they can phase around phantolies. This is a story that says 65 million years ago, you've got Ostropolithicus or kind of pre-hominid creatures that coexisted with dinosaurs, and some of them got eaten by dinosaurs because that's the way these things are.

Roland 46:14

Yeah, it's fascinating. I yeah,

Self-Publishing And Finding Readers

Roland 46:16

that sort of like the the new millennium idea of science and science fiction, because we're sort of towards the end of the list, I'm looking at self-publishing. A lot of science fiction authors are finding an audience through self-publishing rather than following traditional publishing. Out of all the genres, why do you think science fiction can still have that audience even though it hasn't got a like a traditional publisher behind it?

Adam Roberts 46:42

I I'm that's a really good question. And I'm trying to think that there was an answer that might have uh obtained a while back, which is that science fiction fans are more likely to be tech savvy, they're more likely to be early adopters of all this technology, they're more likely to be conf you know habituated to reading on a screen, let's say, but no longer to everyone. You know, my kids have grown up with tech natives, this is second nature to them. And I honestly don't know, and I I confess my ignorance, how much crime or romance gets self-pubbed. I mean, I think it is the case that I mean I teach creative writing, and it's one of the things I do at Roy, and we have to go through this with the creative writing students. This this is how you might get a conventional, traditional publishing contract. This is uh how you can self-pub. The difficulty with self-publication is just so much of it, it's a Niagara of content, and you have to find a way of getting your story and your book into people's phones and into their eyes. And that's hard to do because you're just on your own. You haven't got a publicity campaign that's being paid for by a publisher, you haven't got a PR officer who's getting you reviewed and so on. That said, the advantage Health Pub has is that it's cheaper. So that even if you're just buying an e-book from a regular publisher, it costs that publisher almost as much to produce an e-book as it does to produce a physical book, because most of the cost of a book is the industry professionals who work on it, and the editors, and the covered artists, and the copy editors, and a small fraction is the actual paper and glue and so on. And that means that if you're just doing all that yourself, you can sell it much more cheaply. So I think there is some I don't want to just speculate, but my understanding is some of the genres, the sub-genres of science fiction, do particularly well with self-pubs and military science fiction. There are fans who just love stories about space marines fighting aliens. And you can buy lots and lots of military science fiction that's been self-pubbed, and it costs you a pound, and you read it on your commute, and that's great, and everyone's happy. What interests me is those cases where so the classic example is Andy Weir, who tried to get the Martian published and nobody was interested. So he published it himself on his own website, and then it just really took off and became this enormous global bestseller. Once it was a global bestseller, traditional publishers were then very interested in him and money and put it out as a regular book, and it was made into a big movie with Ridley Scott. I think it would have been improved. We can agree. If there'd been some dinosaurs on Mars, I think that would have a tweak. But it was just a huge thing. And now his he's you know, he's one of the most famous science fiction writers on the planet at the minute, and that's where he started. So that's the the kind of dream. I'm I'm still not sure, and I kind of looked into it a bit, but I'm still not sure what it was about that story and his circumstance. Maybe it is just a spin of the roulette wheel and it just so happened. It's a very it's a well-paced story, and it's a story that if you're interested in how to survive in an alien environment, if you're interested in what the you know, what the terrain of Mars is like, if you're interested in the practicalities of interplanetary travel, it's got lots of interesting details about that. And that takes us back to Jules Verne, who put lots of contemporary science into his books in order to so that we're educative as well as being entertaining. And it does tell an interesting story. I mean it again, it's not a it's not a complicated story because it does it hangs on one question, which is do you think he's gonna survive or not? Is he gonna die on Mars or is he gonna get home again and be rescued? That's the the thing that keeps you reading until have you read The Martian, by the way? Have you seen the movie?

Roland 50:37

No, I haven't. No, I've seen the film, yeah.

Adam Roberts 50:39

Okay, well it's the same story in the film, really.

Roland 50:41

Yeah.

Adam Roberts 50:43

Why that became such a big self-pub phenomenon, I don't know. I mean there are there are other aspects of it. There are forms of text that that it's harder to find a conventional publisher for. Uh Erotica, for instance, and some of you know the specific kiggs that some people are interested in, then you self-pub that because then you reach your particular audience. And it if you're if you are a digital native and you can navigate the web, you can find enough people to buy your book to make it a a viable thing. So I suppose what all the things do we think that there's a dinosaur fan base out there waiting for I think there might be.

Roland 51:23

I feel like with the resurgence of like the films are still very popular. I just wonder whether the films have given us the image of dinosaurs that we're comfortable with. And Jurassic Park is still the epitome of dinosaur entertainment. Even 30 years on, nothing has come along really to challenge that. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's there's somebody waiting with a an amazing story about dinosaurs that is about to be unleashed into the future.

Adam Roberts 51:54

Yeah, that's his hope.

Roland 51:55

That's hope.

Frankenstein Rex And Where To Follow

Roland 51:56

Yeah. Well, I'd just like to say thank you so much for joining me today. I was wondering whether you're working on anything at the moment or have got something coming out.

Adam Roberts 52:03

I do have an all coming out in October, but I'm sorry to say it has no dinosaurs in it at all, and now I feel like I've let the world down. I I wrote a book. It's called Frankenstein Rex, which sounds like it should be a dinosaur, but it's not. It it's a sort of sequel to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And I took the idea that if you read the original Frankenstein, the monster is extraordinarily clever and effectively invulnerable. So I assume, well, let's say he's immortal and can't be killed, and he's incredibly strong and much larger than a regular human being, but also very, very intelligent. Over the 200 years from then till now, my Frankenstein's monster becomes king of the world. That's what the Rex means. So it's set kind of nowish, but in a an alternate version of the world where we're now living in a single world state and it's governed by King Frankenstein, who is in some respects a benign tyrant, but in other respects is a monster because that's that's what he is. So it's about an attempt to assassinate the king of the world who happens to be Frankenstein's monster. It's not entirely unadjacent to uh to dinosaurs and what dinosaurs get up to, but I'll have to think about I'll have to think of a dinosaur story.

Roland 53:18

Please do. Please do. Fantastic. So I was wondering where people can find you online if indeed you want them to.

Adam Roberts 53:25

Yeah, I have a I have a Substack. I'm on Blue Sky, I'm Alton Roberts on Blue Sky, and you can find me there, and it has links to my Substack where I publish articles and essays about all sorts. Or you can find me at Royal Holloway, the University of London, on the university website if you wanted to drop me a line.

Roland 53:42

Fantastic. Well, again, thank you very much for joining me today.

Adam Roberts 53:45

Thank you for inviting me, Roland. It's been great. I've enjoyed talking about it.