In this episode, I chat with author T.K. Rex about her solarpunk stories, including one where we’re talking to dolphins! We discuss how communicating with the non-human can open up our perspective about the changing climate and how the interface between ourselves and nature (and technology) needs to change.
Text Transcript:
Susan Kaye Quinn
Hello Friends!
Welcome to Bright Green Futures, Episode Two, Chatting with Dolphins and Author TK Rex. I'm your host, Susan K. Quinn, and we're here to lift up stories about a more sustainable and just world and talk about the struggle to get there. Today, we're going to talk with author TK Rex about two of her stories, both of which were published in just the last year. A Lot Full of Weeds in Little Blue Marble, and Squawker and Dolphin Swimming Together in Reckoning. These are great stories. I can't wait to get into them. Hi, TK. Thanks for joining us today.
T. K. Rex
I'm so glad to be here. I'm so glad you're doing this podcast.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I am too. I'm very excited, and I appreciate the people that want to come and be my guinea pigs on the second episode.
T. K. Rex
Very happy to be a subject of a scientific experiment here.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Excellent. And for those who know me, like I am constantly experimenting on myself and my friends. So we are right in the lane here. Let me read TK's bio and then I want to talk a little bit because we've been running around in the same circles for a little bit in a kind of funny way. TK Rex, science fiction fantasy author from the Western states whose short stories can be found in more than 20 magazines and literary journals, including Asimov's, Strange Horizons, and Gizmodo. She's a graduate of the Clarion and Taos Toolbox Writers' Workshops, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and occasionally teaches at Writers Grotto in San Francisco. Now, you were on a hopepunk panel with me last year. This year, you're on my podcast. We’ve been Table of Contents mates in a couple of collections now, the Imagine 2200 stories plus the upcoming collection Metamorphosis of those. And then in Little Blue Marble’s 2023 collection World on Fire, I opened it up and there you are like right next to my story! So I love that we just kind of have been doing some similar work. And I can totally see why. I love your stories so much. I love so much what you do with them. And I can't wait to get into that. But I was trying to think, when did we meet? I want to say it was the Imagine 2200 Author Zoom Tea...
T. K. Rex
Yeah, yeah, that was it. Definitely.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That was such a great idea. I think we had another Zoom Tea after that, just ourselves, talking about rewilding. I've met a bunch of wonderful people as I dive into all of this writing of solarpunk and hopepunk stories, and you are definitely one of them. So thank you for being here.
T. K. Rex
Yeah, back at you, Susan. Gosh, all of that.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That is actually part of the pods reason to be: I want to collect together all of these great stories, but also the great people who are making them. I always find it a deep irony—I don't know how you feel about this—but you know, a lot of our stories talk about collectivism or connection and working together. And yet we're all toiling endlessly in our little corners, not talking to each other. You're like, wait a minute.
T. K. Rex
Some of us are talking, I don't know. I was going to say like, the community building within the solarpunk and hopepunk writers community is so on theme for solarpunk and hopepunk. I think it's one of the few genres where I think more than any other that I can think of—well, besides literary fiction, but we won't talk about them—we get to actually kind of live and practice a little bit more of what we're putting into our stories. And so much of it is aspirational for ourselves, including the world. I think a lot of us are on a journey of trying to internalize what we're writing about as well.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That's such a great point. I totally agree. Certainly true for me personally, and almost everyone I've ever talked to that writes in this space. They're like, yeah, this is how I want the world to be. And so I'm trying to imagine it into being. Some of that you can do yourself, but some of it is big structural stuff. But I still think it still applies. Like we have to imagine it first before we can collectively as a society make it happen.
T. K. Rex
Oh, yeah. Like all of that came up in the panel we did—the hopepunk panel—and, for listeners, if they want to watch that panel, I think it's the only hopepunk panel on YouTube, but it also was at the Watertown Public Library. So the combination of those two should at least help you find it.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Definitely. I will be putting links to that in the show notes. Finding this stuff sometimes can be hard because it's scattered. So that's part of what we're doing here is collecting it all together. So let's talk about your stories. The first one, A Lot Full of Weeds. My little summary of it is: a short story about a magical seed bomb and reclaiming the paved over places for humans and nature alike. And so seed bombs: I love it. They're a popular gorilla gardening technique used by solar punks and activists. And in this story, it's kind of a magic-enhanced direct action. I just love that element of it. What was appealing to you about using that to drive your story?
T. K. Rex
I wish I remembered exactly where the idea came from. I'd read like some science fiction story where I was like, this is kind of a Jack and the Beanstalk story. I bet I could do one of those. Somehow that, over a few months, gelled with this idea of seed bombs because I'd been thinking about more ways to do a little bit of guerrilla activism and stuff.
And my mom and I have been talking about it. She's a long time environmentalist, and it kind of came up, and then they just gelled. The other part of that story, of course, which is I think the biggest part is the housing issue in San Francisco, which is an issue everywhere and will increasingly be one as climate change gets worse. It's such a whole huge topic in San Francisco.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right? And everywhere. I grew up in California, and Los Angeles has always had a homeless problem/issue. But unhoused people now are just so—unsurprisingly, because housing is expensive—but it is getting worse. And as you say, it's going to get worse. And we really need to come up with a better way to approach it. So I love how your story integrates that in in this very compassionate way and using food forests and like, it really challenges this idea of why do we have to pay for stuff that literally grows out of the ground? Can we can we find another way to look at this problem? And I think that's a beautiful representation of how these stories can help us. They help us to challenge our preconceived notions, our built-in structural biases, all of that. And you've done this in a beautiful way with the seed bomb. I liked how, at one point in the story, you were like: I really would like to have a little tree house that I can go live in. And I'm like: yeah, me too. That sounds fun. I kind of like that. There's that aspirational piece again, right? So that's cool.
T. K. Rex
Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That story is in a Little Blue Marble. And I wanted to mention for our listeners that there are these journals or zine/magazines where you can find more of this kind of stuff. Little Blue Marble is one of those. It's a Canadian zine. All of their stuff is online to read. So you don't have to have a lot of money. You can go access it. I really like the person who runs it, Katrina Archer; she just has just a wonderful attitude, you know? I find that again, it's the people that are involved. I keep finding amazing people involved in these types of stories. So I will definitely point people there.
Let's talk about your second story because in this one, we're going to do an excerpt. It's a little bit longer story and there's just a lot going on in this story that I love. So, all right. Now, am I reading the excerpts or are you reading the excerpt? I forgot.
T. K. Rex
I don't have it up.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Okay, then it's me. All right. So this is Squawker and Dolphin Swimming Together, which was published originally in Reckoning 7. My summary of it says it's a story about interspecies communication and how it's not just talking at someone but with someone, which is a lesson I feel a lot of humanity could stand to have some deeper instruction on.
So here's the excerpt.
“…Tursiops has been around at least five million years, and the dolphin braincase has barely changed in twelve million. They’ve had the biology to communicate with this level of complexity six times longer than we’ve been capable of spoken language. We know they have the mental capacity. We know they’re capable of abstract thought. And now we finally have a way of teasing out which words are literal representations of our world, and which aren’t. Those are the ones I want to understand next, Tumelo.”
“I’m with you, Dr. Redhearth. It’s all very exciting.”
Julia swallows the last of her warm prosecco. “You’re bilingual.”
“Trilingual, actually,” Tumelo grins. “Why?”
“Nice. So you know how learning a new language expands the way you see the world, the concepts you have access to.”
“Oh definitely.”
“Imagine what new concepts they could bring into our world, Tumelo.”
Susan Kaye Quinn
I just love this story so much. My husband and my youngest kiddo, who's learning ASL, demanded that I send them the link, as soon as I told them about this story. They're like, wait, what? She's talking to dolphins? I need that. So there's definitely a huge hook right there. Anyone who likes dolphins is going to be way into this story. But a big theme of our pod here is renegotiating our relationship with both nature and technology and how that's fundamental to solutions to the climate crisis. So this idea that non-human language can give us access to new concepts is so powerful to me. And of course it works with human languages and computer interfaces as well. So tell me more, where does your imagination go when thinking about what those concepts might be and what fascinates you about that user interface?
T. K. Rex
Susan.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Sorry, if that's a really big question!
T. K. Rex
I love this topic. Also, I love your take on this story and just your interpretation of both talking to someone and them talking back. That was absolutely there, and I just never articulated it to myself that way and I love hearing you say that.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It jumps right out at me. Maybe it's just my brain, but I think you knew what you were doing with this, even if you didn't articulate it in your brain. And I do that all the time with stories too, where I'm like, oh yeah, that's what I was doing with that. So tell me more.
T. K. Rex
Oh, man. This story was one of my most thoroughly researched stories. I've been wanting to write a story about dolphin communication for a really long time. It's a topic that goes way back for me. I don't know if you knew this or not, but my dad wrote a book called Wet Goddess, Recollections of a Dolphin Lover. And it is like a controversial book. He's done a lot of interviews about it. He's very open about it being thinly fictionalized memoir. And he told me about this experience that he had with a dolphin. Look up the book. You'll figure it out.
Susan Kaye Quinn
We will definitely put a link to that in the notes.
T. K. Rex
It's not really hopepunk. It's actually sort of tragic and sad, but it's weird and 70s and full of just being a confused 19 year old. And there's a dolphin and there's a lot of psychedelics. So I highly recommend it. Also, he's my dad and I love him. But he told me about this experience when I was like fifteen, and it was very weird and disturbing for me, but in a “parent talking about that kind of thing at all” kind of level. And it was a weird time in general. But like he's always been really fascinated with dolphins. And he once interviewed the dolphin scientist John C. Lilly for Future Life magazine before I was born. So it has always been this topic that I've been aware of. And he's done so much of his own very thorough reading all of the material about this going all the way back to the 70s. And he's still very on top of what's happening in the field, even though he's not a marine biologist of any kind, he's a journalist.
Just the possibilities of what dolphins could be doing with their language is so fascinating because they use echolocation to perceive their world and they can send and receive an echolocation. So if they're getting an image from the world, they can send the same signal that they received from the world to another dolphin. And in a way, they process it visually, as far as we know. We don't know if this is actually what they're doing, but just that it's possible is so mind blowing to me. There's a lot of real science communication, dolphin communication-science in this story. I'm building on it into a speculative place where I'm saying, let's just go ahead and assume they're doing 3D communication, which is something very different from what we do. Except now that we have video, we can kind of do it, but not in real time, the way that they can still, you know? Like I could send you a video of something that I'm seeing or I could livestream it to you. So actually we do come pretty close. It's still not like three dimensional or whatever. It's something that we can only do with technology and only very recently. But there's no reason not to think they've been able to do that for five million years. So who knows where they've gone with it in that amount of time. It's just a really, really fascinating space to me. And what was the original question? I got nerdy on the part that I was interested in, sorry.
Susan Kaye Quinn
No, I'm into this completely. I wanted to know what kind of concepts you were thinking might come back from the non-human world. But while you're thinking about that, I just wanted to throw out: my kid who's into ASL, I just sent her a article that was about a comedian who does puns. So they play with language in English, but they're learning ASL. And so they're learning ASL humor. And so the humor that you can do with your hands is very different and intrinsic to ASL. Like if you didn't get ASL, you would not understand why it was funny, right?
T. K. Rex
Okay.
Susan Kaye Quinn
As a word nerd, this is so extremely fascinating to me. So now I'm thinking about dolphin puns in 3D. And the way you portrayed it in the story was so great that I could totally visualize it. There's gotta be such a richness and complexity there that, like you're saying, they've been doing this for 5 million years. They probably figured out how to be punny.
T. K. Rex
I would kind of imagine so. Just like knowing dolphins, which I don't really, but like even if you don't know much about dolphins, they probably have a sense of humor, right?
Susan Kaye Quinn
It comes through, yes.
T. K. Rex
So talking about what kinds of things we might learn from them, what that communication might actually include if and when we actually make that kind of contact. I think the closest analogy that we have, which doesn't even really come close, but… one of the better things to come out of the Enlightenment, which of course is building on the terrible era of colonization, which we're now still in actively and paying many prices for, but one of the really, really interesting things is the way that not just that colonizers deeply and horrifically impacted the places they were colonizing, but the conversation went the other way too.
And we got democracy out of the people that were being colonized. We got ways of thinking that influenced every field of science, philosophy, psychology. It goes on and on. And those are people. Those are human people who are not all that different from us and haven't been separated all that long and are still very much the same species. And we're able to all speak the same language physically. Belugas can kind of mimic English, but for the most part, you're not going to have cetaceans ever speaking English, and we're not ever going to be able to do what they do without like ridiculous cyborg modifications, right? Like, maybe I'll write that story later, I don't know. But the ideas that come from other cultures have changed our world so much, just from other human cultures. I have absolutely no idea what we might get from them or what the content of those conversations might be. But I think the possibilities are so exciting. I think just from learning how their language works, we'll have new ideas, just from that very beginning.
There's work being done currently. There's a project currently called Project Ceti, which is with a C, not an S. That's the other space guys. But Project Ceti with a C is communication with sperm whales using AI. And it's really fascinating. So they're collecting as many recordings as they can from sperm whales in an area and then using AI to try and build out what they think might be a model of the language. It's the first step to then being able to maybe find the context of what those words mean. But figuring out what even is a word is the first part. When we're communicating with other humans, usually that's a lot easier. If you were to meet a human, and you have no idea what language they're speaking, you could still figure out probably like what's a word and what isn't.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, there's such a gulf between how our brains work and how a non-human brain works. But of course, similarities. It's such a great point about how we don't know what those new concepts could be. We can't know, because it's so outside the realm of our human experience. And yet, we know the possibility, and we have that echo of the possibility in so many different dimensions of how we communicate with each other. Of course. Of course there's going to be some great new things that would be out there and probably some heartbreaking ones as well.
T. K. Rex
Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Also, I was just like smiling and crying and laughing through your story. So readers: be prepared for this story. There's going to be some emotional impact going on.
T. K. Rex
Oh, I'm sorry.
Susan Kaye Quinn
No, that's the best. That's the absolute best. But I liked the idea of there being fellow travelers in this climate crisis, where you've got the human perspective of what the climate crisis means. And then you've got the dolphin perspective, which is very different, but also similar in some ways. And that was just such a wonderful connection and also a lead in to my next question, which has to do with Amitav Ghosh's 2016 critique of fiction and its lack of attention to climate stories in his book, The Great Derangement, which I highly recommend if our listeners have not heard of it before. He talks about why our stories have a hard time talking about climate, but he also looks at it through the lens of how we look at nature and the fact that we've forgotten that nature looks back. And so I love how your dolphin character has a chance to literally look for your human character.
And they have this shared response to the crisis, but in different ways. And this seeing and being seen is part of that communication. And it's a fundamental need that I think all beings have, certainly all human beings. So I think that the idea of being seen by the non-human and truly seeing the non-human in the world is part of that renegotiation of our relationship with nature that we need to do in order to coexist, in order to live sustainably in the world. You can't do that if you're actively destroying it and not actively destroying it means you need to see it in a different way.
So these non-human POVs are a recurring theme in your stories. So what would you say is challenging about writing that perspective? Because sometimes you write from the POV of a little flying drone in the rewilding zone and sometimes you do it from the perspective of your human narrator but you bring in that perspective. So what is the challenge of doing that as a writer?
T. K. Rex
I think robots are easy because we don't have real life examples of them, so they don't have to be realistic. I can just take the part of myself that's already sort of robotic and play with that.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Nice.
T. K. Rex
The first story I had published that was from a non-human point of view is called Growing Swirling Clouds. It follows a robot who's left behind on a generation ship after it's come to the planet that was its destination. Everybody has left except for some of the people who were too frail to go down to the planet. And so it's just this robot and this one elderly woman at the end. The robot is sort of in this caregiving role that was really very much me processing that role with my grandmother when she was in home hospice. It was very easy to tap into being a robot caregiver because there's so much of being in that role that... it's really hard to explain. If you've done it, you probably know, but you end up trying to find the right face that you should have instead of expressing what you actually feel on the inside, which is like, abject terror. You know?
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right. There's grief, anger probably at whatever is making this happen, all these feelings, but you have this thing where you want to protect who you're caring for from that. So, yeah, I understand.
T. K. Rex
Yeah, it was very much about that. And even though it's a robot, it's a very human perspective. And with my story, Hold Out in the Northern California Designated Wildcraft Zone, which is now like my most reprinted and talked about story, and I'm regretting giving it such a long title. In Holdout, it's a wildcraft drone, which is this little robot whose job it is to rewild a section of Northern California. And in this future, that rewilding effort has also displaced people. When I first came up with the idea, it was utopian fiction, and then I realized it was dystopian. But, you know, this one's still a hopepunk story because I found in the journey of world building in that world so many ways for the characters in it to break that and to do what was right anyway. And I have had so much fun with that. So this robot’s on a bit of that journey. And it's also like coming from a place in the beginning of the story where it's doing one thing that doesn't involve humans. So it doesn't need to have human things going on necessarily, but it is caring for an environment and ecosystem. And so I think it comes through in little pieces here and there, that it cares, it has its own version of feelings and attachments toward the creatures and the plants and animals that are in this system. But it has to get an upgrade to interact successfully with a human. So it kind of like changes and, I guess, code switches along the way.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It's an interesting way to sort of examine our relationship with technology also, which I think is the other flip side of that coin: what are we going to create in terms of technology and how do we want to relate to it and how do we send it off on our behalf to do things, which is what the drone is doing. You do definitely have to do some anthropomorphizing-ish sorts of things to help the reader understand. Even if you didn't, even if somehow you were trying to make it extremely mechanical and robotic, readers do that anyway. We as humans just do that anyway. We'll make a rock into a friend.
T. K. Rex
Mm-hmm. If you want to make this an hour-long podcast, can we talk about animal and technology?
Susan Kaye Quinn
I know, right? We could go there for a long time. Maybe we'll have to have you back to talk about the technology part of this because yes, that's a whole bag of worms… mechanical worms. So yes, but going back to trying to portray non-human things, I felt like with your dolphin character, you were not just simply anthropomorphizing. You were really, bringing us into that dolphin POV, like this is how a dolphin might think differently about this, putting it in the framework of their life in the ocean, which of course we can't really understand. But I think you give us a glimmer of that. And I think that's one of the more powerful aspects of the story is you really feel like that dolphin is a character in the story that is again, seeing and being seen. And that's a powerful hack for humans to get in our heads and help us to see things differently.
T. K. Rex
Yeah. That story, is written from the point of view of the scientist who's the lead scientist on the research team, Julia. And she's trying to put herself in the head of the dolphin who's named Summer. There's also the drone who's this intermediary who doesn't necessarily have like a will of its own, but it's something they both interact with and think of fondly as sort of a member of the team, you know? It's not so much that I was trying to write from the dolphins point of view. I couldn't even, I don't think I have the guts to do that. I feel like someday the dolphins are gonna read it and they're gonna be like, oh, I can't believe she wrote about this like that, you know? Like, I couldn't do that.
Susan Kaye Quinn
One star from the dolphin.
T. K. Rex
But I tried really hard to make Summer a full character as much as any of the other people that are in there because I know that my protagonist thinks of Summer as a person. And my protagonist is also trying to get the rest of the world to see what she sees, that this is a person, deserving of rights. And from what I know about cetacean researchers, they kind of run the gamut. There's many different perspectives there, but that is one that I know some of them have. And I don't think it's unusual among animal cognition researchers, either, if you've ever heard Irene Pepperberg talk about her work or Jane Goodall. Gosh, people who work closely with intelligent animals understand them as people. I think more often than not.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Even people who don't work with the animals and have that direct contact, there definitely are people who understand that. And not everybody, obviously, but I don't think it's too hard of a leap for many people, especially if you come from a more compassionate place in your life, that, hey, this person, this non-human person deserves better.
T. K. Rex
Yeah. We live in a world where it's it's hard enough to get people to be seen as people. For human beings to be treated like people. And that was a point I also wanted to address in the story. And it's one that my protagonist, Julia, struggles with a little bit during a critical moment. But this story isn't about that. It's about the other part of it. It's about it's about dolphins. It's about dolphins and climate change.
Susan Kaye Quinn
It is, but I actually want to talk about that moment, because I know the moment you're talking about, and it jumped out at me, because I personally have that feeling a lot: like, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the most important thing? And despite the fact that I believe very strongly that we all need to work inside of our circles using the talents we already have in the places we already are on the planet to do stuff there, because every place needs it and every person has those capabilities... despite believing that very strongly, I still have that moment where I have doubt about whether I'm doing the right thing or, you know, contributing in the right way. And so that was actually a really compelling moment for me in the story, hearing your character voice those thoughts as well. So I'm glad you put it in there.
T. K. Rex
Yeah, I am too. I couldn't not put it in there, you know what I mean? Because of everything that's going on. To that point, I came across something on social media, and I wish I remembered where this came from, and it may have been like a tertiary quote anyway, but somebody on social media somewhere used this metaphor of the whole system is like this sweater. It's a sweater that's knitted. I'm totally butchering this metaphor, but we're going to make up a new one as we go. So it's a knitted sweater, the whole system, and any thread you can pull on is going to help. Right? It's going to help unravel it.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Fantastic. That's so true. We forget that the strength of the sweater doesn't come from each of the individual threads. It comes from the weaving of them together and how we connect and how we interlock, right? So you can also undo that by pulling on one of the threads, right? It's not that the thread is strong. It's that you’re breaking all the connections.
T. K. Rex
Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I love that metaphor.
T. K. Rex
And the way that we treat animals and the way that we treat the ocean is all completely coming from the same place as the way we treat people. And it's colonialism. You know, it's all colonialism.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, it's here for me to use and abuse and exploit and extract.
T. K. Rex
Exactly. It's all part of the same follow -up.
Susan Kaye Quinn
And that mentality is what got us here. That's what we have to unravel and come up with better stories to about how we can live and be in the world without doing that. And that is a great place for us to wind up, I think.
Of course, this time has flown by, and I just absolutely love having you on. Thank you. Definitely going to have you come back for a technology talk because I feel like we could go on about that for some time.
T. K. Rex
Mm-hmm. Oh and animism.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Oh my goodness. Okay, so sidebar on that. I have a small group that I've been working with and one of them is very much into animism and we've been diving into that. So, yeah, that's another topic we're gonna have to surface here. But for my winding up here, I have three quick questions for you. First one is what hopeful climate fiction have you read recently that you would recommend?
T. K. Rex
Okay, I saw this one before we started talking, and I panicked a little bit because I have been very bad at reading things lately. I have been really focused on more community stuff and getting existing stuff out there and I have like deprioritized reading, which is terrible of me, absolutely terrible. But I taught a class in the fall at the Writers Grotto. And one of the students brought in a climate fiction story. And it was a little bit hopeful, but it was really exciting to see people who are newer to this space bringing stuff in. And I can't tell you about it because it's not published, but it was Kurt's story. And it was lovely. And I really hope it finds a home.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That is so helpful to hear just that creation is going on.
T. K. Rex
And new people are coming into it. I was at a retreat workshop thing in the fall. And it was almost all literary fiction writers, which I am like hardcore sci-fi fantasy background here. So I felt a little bit out of place. But once I started talking to people, there were several who were like, oh, yeah, I don't read science fiction, but I read climate fiction. And I'm like, let me tell you what climate fiction is. Did you know that it's got science in it? And it's in the future? Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, it's so funny that literary fiction and science fiction have this, you know, like long standing feud. And then there's climate fiction, who's like the abandoned child that neither one of them really wants to claim and yet belongs to both of them.
T. K. Rex
Totally. But it turns out climate fiction is more of interest to literary writers and I think editors probably too than a lot of other science fiction is, which is really fascinating and hopefully bodes well for my future as a writer. I don't know. But yeah, a lot of my reading has been feedback for peers who are writing in this space. And that's where I do most of my reading. I haven't been reading a lot of published stuff that I can recommend at the moment. I'm so sorry.
Susan Kaye Quinn
No, no, that's great. I'm glad to hear the creation is going on because that's what we need most right now. And we will have a list that we will be growing. So if you come up with something and want to email it to me, I will add it onto our recommended reads list. All right, next question. What do you do to stay grounded and hopeful in our precarious and fast changing world?
T. K. Rex
I have really had to turn local. So this was a journey for me that started with being in my early 30s and realizing I didn't have any friends who lived near me anymore. I've been working in the advertising and tech industries in San Francisco. It's very transient and like everybody moves to New York. So I kind of was at this point where I was like, oh no, I don't have any friends and also like everyone I really care about is older than me. I'm going to die alone.
Susan Kaye Quinn
I seriously doubt that.
T. K. Rex
So I was like, I got to build community. I got to go find some community. And also, all the climate anxiety has hit me so hard, you know what I mean? For years and years. And I realizing that even though I felt so small on that global scale… and in national elections and that whole mess in the US, feeling so useless and small… Even coming from San Francisco… like I'm glad to be represented by more or less progressive politicians, excluding some of them, but my vote on the national things never really mattered because I live in a place that's aligned with my politics for the most part.
But it turns out when you narrow it down to local politics, it's as big on the inside as it is on the outside. So talking about just the housing issue, which we mentioned earlier, like, wow, the number of differing wildly and vehemently differing opinions in San Francisco alone, just in my building. I have a Facebook group for my neighbors in my building. And the different opinions just on one floor is enormous. It turns out that locally, I can at least influence the conversation a little bit. Like I can write things that are locally relevant, and I can read them at readings publicly to people who live here and are voting this week.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right.
T. K. Rex
Maybe I'll try to write a think piece for the Chronicle. There's so much more influence I can have locally, and that's true for literally everybody on the planet. You can have more influence locally, and your local elections are so important. Because the voices that you lift up in those local elections and the people who become represented in those local elections, piece by piece, those equate into the bigger ones. Those build up into the bigger ones. So think about who you're giving power to in your local elections where you can actually make a difference. It's really important.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That's fantastic. And I'm sitting here nodding along because I believe very strongly in all of that. People often get stuck, when we're feeling precarious and things are changing too fast. It's because we've kind of become unmoored from our local spot on the planet and the local people and the systems that are there.
T. K. Rex
Yeah.
Susan Kaye Quinn
And that re-anchoring… it's even built into the words staying grounded. That is the word, the ground…
T. K. Rex
The ground is in the word.
Susan Kaye Quinn
Literally right where you are is a powerful place to be, if you inhabit it and be present and be involved and connected. I think that's a solution to a lot of our loneliness. As you said: I don't have people I'm connected to anymore. I need to change that. That's the first step I feel in so many ways.
T. K. Rex
Yeah, building local community has been huge. And I think on the topic of colonization, actually being connected to the place where you live is a way that all of us can fight against colonialism and try to shift that into something else that we emerge out of it into, you know what I mean?
Susan Kaye Quinn
Right, understanding the history of your place and how it got here and who are the peoples that came before you and who are still present.
T. K. Rex
And feeling a sense of responsibility toward the place that you live too, you know? When you're not from there, it can be hard. It can take a long time. It took me 20 years to start to feel that way about San Francisco. And now that I do feel it, like I'm happier here, which was an unexpected side effect. Like I feel more at home. I feel more confident. I feel like I am the one now who welcomes new people who come. You know, like I want to leave it better than I found it.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That's beautiful and wonderful. I love it. All right, final question. What are you working on right now? You said you're doing a lot of community work, which is amazing. But writing wise, what are you working on? Or is that on hiatus for a little bit?
T. K. Rex
What aren't I working on? Yeah, I tend to have a lot of different stories in progress. So there's several short stories. I've been planning out a novel. I've written a couple. One of them ended up getting rewritten as a short story, and that was one of my Wildcraft Drones stories called The Roots in the Box and The Roots in the Bones. It takes place like a couple hundred years after Holdout. And that one's in Asimov's. I'm looking to hopefully find another place for it so we can find it easier. I might have something new set in that world soon. I also am querying a young adult science fiction novel. And I'm planning another novel, which is going to have a lot of ecological themes, which are throughout all of my work. All my fantasy is also like eco-fantasy too. But this one is more about biodiversity and evolution. And that's a whole other topic that I could go on for a whole other hour about.
The core concept that I really want to play with and explore is if Charles Darwin had been trying to understand evolution in a different kind of society that wasn't a colonialist capitalist society, would he have come up with the theory of natural selection first? Or would he have come up with one of the other selections first, like group selection? And when you really dig into evolutionary biology, there's so many different drivers of selection, including just genetic drift or pure randomness that came up later as people dug into it. And so there's no rule that it had to be natural selection first. And it's probably not even the main driver of evolution. So I'm thinking about a bit of an alternate timeline, where it's not necessarily Charles Darwin. It's a different character, because I don't want to do historical fiction. But I want to do world building and make up my own character and everything like that, because I'm just a nerd like that. But that's the idea that I'm really interested in playing with right now.
Susan Kaye Quinn
That sounds fascinating. I love it. And I look forward to seeing all your new stories come out and hopefully you will sell the novel you're querying and write many more.
Thank you so much for being on the pod and being my guinea pig to launch the pod. I really super appreciate that. And it's just a pleasure as always to talk to you.
T. K. Rex
Oh, you too, Susan.
Bright Green Futures is a weekly newsletter/podcast. Check out the Featured Stories and Hopeful Climate Fiction lists for further reading. The best way to support the show is to subscribe and share the stories with your friends.
LINKS Ep. 2: Chatting with Dolphins (and author T.K. Rex)
Growing Swirling Clouds by T.K. Rex
Wet Goddess, Recollections of a Dolphin Lover by Malcolm J. Brenner
The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh
Virtual Author Panel on Hopepunk (Susan Kaye Quinn, T.K. Rex, Renan Bernardo, Brianna Castognozzi, Watertown Library, Jan 2023)
Metamorphosis collection (published by Milkweed Editions)
Little Blue Marble’s collection World on Fire, 2023
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