Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Okay, so this reading is from chapter two of the tusks of extinction, and for background, this is taking place in the poachers tents, who are there on the reservation to see if they can poach tusks from the resurrected mammoths.
Chapter two once, when my ninit's mother was a small child, her family was moving their reindeer herd from one pasture to another.
As they were fording a river, my grandfather saw something strange in the mud on the bank, like a mass of hair with great horns curving out from it.
He took a closer look and then forbade anyone in the family to go near it.
But they all slowed their reindeer and stared as they went past.
My mother told me how its teeth showed on one side of its hairy skull in a terrible grin, and the great horns came not out of the top of its head but out of the front of its face.
It was a mammoth, exposed by a spring thaw and floodwater cutting into the banks of the river.
Later that night, after they'd set up camp, my grandmother asked my grandfather why they were not allowed to touch it or even approach it. He told her it was a servant of Nga, master of the frozen underworld.
It had tried to escape through a hole into the middle world, the world where we live, and had become trapped between.
To touch it or even to go near it was bad luck. It would put a curse on the family, many ninits who had disturbed the creatures from the underworld ice died from disease or went mad, he said. Whole villages could be destroyed.
Did she say how big its tusks were? Dimitri asked. I bet someone made a fortune off that monster. And if they went mad, it was in a Moscow banya surrounded by blondes.
The mechanic who'd been speaking, a man named Musena, just shook his head and returned to his bowl of rice and fish.
Dmitry nudged Sviatoslav. We touched plenty of monsters from the underworld last year without any madness, right, son?
And Sviatoslav thought of the expedition he had taken with his father last year, hunting for mammoth tusks in the thawing permafrost along a muddy, freezing river. He thought of the wounds torn in the earth by the miners hoses and the men in rubber hip waders crawling into the gaping holes, chipping fragments of bone, teeth, and skulls from the ice.
The whole expedition had been a blur of drunkenness and chaos, and on the way back downriver, one of the boats foundered and sank. The team, bickering and fighting the whole way, had to cram into the other boat and labor home dangerously taking on water while the men passed a bottle around.
All they had to show for the trip was one complete step bison skull, which they cleaned and mounted on the front of the boat.
I think your grandfather was right, Sviatoslav said to Musena. The creatures of the underworld are cursed and terrible things happen to people who disturb them.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Very good. That was Rey Naylor ream from his latest novel, the tusks of extinction. Moscow has resurrected the mammoth, but someone must teach them how to be mammoths or they are doomed to die out again. The world's foremost expert in elephant behavior is called in to help. While she was murdered a century ago, her digitized consciousness is uploaded into the brain of a mammoth. Can she help the magnificent creatures fend off poachers long enough for their species to take hold? Ray Naylor is the author of the critically acclaimed Locust award winning debut novel the Mountain and the Sea, the finalist for the Nebula Award and for the LA Times Book Awards. Ray Bradbury Award for science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction, so far been translated into over a dozen languages. He's currently a diplomatic fellow and visiting scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University. Ray, welcome to the show.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Hey, Josh, thank you for having me today.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Why don't you begin conceptualizing the story of the tusks of extinction?
[00:04:04] Speaker A: That's a good question. I think some of the ideas I'd had for a while, I had a. Had the idea for a long time of doing something about elephant poaching. This was an issue I worked on while I was in Ho Chi Minh City at the consulate there.
I was the environment, science, technology and health officer, and we dealt with some ivory trafficking and also trafficking in the rhino horn. So I think the idea of writing about that, which is a part of this story, was there for a long time. And then I was poking around, reading some things about de extinction and kind of doing my normal research in science fiction, trying to stay up on the new technologies and what's going on in science. And somehow those two ideas sort of merged into one idea. And I also realized it would be an interesting way to explore things like the, the way that the shapes of our bodies change meaning and some of the other interesting parts of the mountain and the sea that I was still looking to write a little bit more about.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Did you always have a lifelong fascination with mammoths?
[00:05:16] Speaker A: No, I don't think so. I did have an almost lifelong fascination with octopuses, but mammoths, I think a little bit. I've been a little bit less so I've always been really interested, though, in elephants, ever since I was a little kid and seeing them at the zoo. And I think, like most people, I'm attracted to all those big, charismatic animals that seem to have some kind of deep thought process going on. I think elephants count among them. We go to the zoo, you watch them, or you see wildlife specials, and it's quite clear that these are big, intelligent creatures living very intricate lives.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: I want to talk a little bit more about this with you. So while reading, I randomly thought of the quote from Wittgenstein, that if a lion could speak, we could not understand him. The reason being the life of a lion is so divorced from our experiences, it's unlikely we could discern any meaning from its speech.
What challenges did you have in writing the inner life of.
I believe Damira, is how I say it.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, perfect.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Damira, after she becomes a mammoth.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: You know, I think that that challenge was sort of one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was I wanted to see if I could find a way to show how a human mind put into the mind of a mammoth, would change over time, how it would begin to lose its previous form and come to be something new.
I love that. I love that Wickenstreng quote. That quote was almost put in as the quote at the beginning of the mountain and the sea, in fact.
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Really? Okay.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: I removed it in an early draft. I replaced real world quotes with these quotes from these invented books that a couple of the characters in the novel had allegedly written. And so that quote fell by the wayside. But it's one that I really love. There's another quote similarly that, you know, I think it's like if lions had gods, then the gods would all look like lions. And I like that, too, the way that we shape the world so that it looks like us.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Something like us, right?
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean, just in the way that you see human faces everywhere, right in the grill of a car or in the wood grain of a table and things like that. Things are so self referential, you take.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Elements of understanding mammoth biology to enhance the storytelling here. It's brilliant how I could envision in the theater of my mind, a mammoth rubbing their trunk on the roof of their mouth and a conjuring up memories of the past. And for them, it feels substantive and as material as the present moment. What reasons did you turn to for making sense of evolutionary details of resurrecting mammoths in this way?
[00:08:05] Speaker A: I think it's part in depth research of what the science is about elephants and other species that we know, know a little bit better than we, that we know the mammoth. And then part of it is you extend from that with some, you know, of your own imagination. And I think we all have that, that experience of smell invoking these really fantastically colorful and sort of intricate memories that things like sight won't get to these parts of our brain that are accessed only by that. And I think a lot of what you do as a writer is you look for these places where you might have connect with a character. Maybe you don't understand everything from about the character, but I understand what it's like to smell jasmine, for example, and remember this jasmine Bush that was near my house when I was a kid, and almost be transported by that smell back to that earlier place. And then if I just sort of crank up that feeling, I can begin to start to describe maybe what it would be like to be a mammoth. Right? It's a little bit like we can't know what it's like to be a bat. Like the famous Nagel essay, we can understand that, for example, blind people can partially echolocate in a room and understand where furniture is by sound.
And so it's not completely impossible to get, at least at the edges of the mindset of what it might be like to be different kinds of animals. And that was a big challenge for me with this book, was, how do I get into the mind of a mammoth? But I think, again, that challenge is sort of why I wrote it in the first place.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: What I like, too, is, I mean, a central theme I noticed in this work, and also alongside the mountainous sea, was the role memory plays in the formation of our identities. You take this further with Damra, though, when she becomes a mammoth, where it really, truly is like she is living these, it's almost like a waking state for her to live in the past when she has contact with these senses. And could you talk about how you developed that into her character?
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I wanted Damira to be this protagonist who's clearly haunted by her past and trying to make sense as well of where she comes from and why she is who she is, but also some of the tragedies that happened in her life. And I thought this was an interesting scientific idea, the idea that, you know, the elephant's memory might be much more concrete than ours, that it might sort of transport them really into a place that was as present for them as the present moment is. But I think it also was a way to look at how, as human beings, we use our memories as a way to tell ourselves a story about where we are and where we might be going. And it's our continual sort of accessing of and interpretation of our memories that allows us to tell that story of ourselves, which is essentially what Damira is doing throughout the tusks of extinction, until she sort of gets no spoilers to what might be the sort of seed of where she ended up.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: There's a discipline I first gained exposure to while reading your novel, the Mountain of the sea, that is brought up again in your acknowledgments called biosemiotics. I was familiar with semiotics while reading up on Humberto eco in college. Like the study of meaning that comes through communication systems, could you explain what bio semiox is and how it's at the core of tusks?
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Sure. So what biosemiotics does is it takes that discipline of semiotics, which is the study of meaning and how signs make meaning, and it extends it out into the study of biology. So you can imagine it as you and I are speaking. We're exchanging complex signs in a linguistic manner. Right? We're also. I'm also looking at a sign of you right now on the screen. It's an icon, and it references your real existence in the world. I assume that it means that you're real and out there at the present time somewhere, right? You assume the same thing about me. But then there are other signs that are being exchanged that we're not aware of. So underneath all of that, there are other biological signs. A really good example of this is you conceive of yourself as having. Almost as having access to the light that is, as if it's coming into your brain directly. So you see the sun and the sunlight is perceived by the mind. But what is concealed in this process is the fact that what's really happening is a message is being delivered that indicates that there's light hitting your eyeball to the brain. And then, in fact, no light ever penetrates the brain. That what's happening is that the cells themselves are using semiotic processes to communicate to other cells that light is present.
The brain exists in this darkness inside the skull and never actually has access to light. The light is mediated through a sign process. And all the way down through biology, everything is mediated, right? Nothing is actually seen directly. Everything is mediated by signs, even at a cellular level. So things are used as messengers. Molecules are used to indicate the presence of other things. Messages are delivered. And these delivery mechanisms demand something to interpret them. And what bio semiotics kind of insists upon is that life is this fundamentally semiotic interpretive process. That doesn't mean it's not also flesh and all of those things. That's the substrate it exists in. But without the exchange of information and the interpretation of information, life just couldn't be what it is.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: What I enjoy about your work, Ray, is besides just being a great writer, you're able to, as you put in your website, you're a builder of rhetorical machines. It's the intersection of science and philosophy you draw out in your work that feels plausible to me, that I respond to and I love. Can you unpack what you mean when you say that science fiction, for you, is not predictive, but predicative?
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Sure. So I think that sometimes science fiction predicts the future, but when it does, so, it's usually an accident.
Or it's because that science fiction is based on a close reading of what science is doing now and an extrapolation of the things that it might do in the future. But I don't think that's what's really important about science fiction. I think what's really important about science fiction is what it essentially is, is you take the world, you change something about that world, and then you build a new world predicated upon that change to see what would be different. So a little, you can think of it in some ways as maybe turning up the volume on something. So one of the things that I did in the tusks of extinction is turned up the volume on elephant poaching, so that instead of it being this terrible problem, but probably not threatening the actual existence of the elephants on planet Earth, I turn it all the way up so that elephants really do become extinct in the wild.
That enables me to sort of talk about what the consequences of those things would be psychologically for people, etcetera. I mean, for me, the real importance of science fiction is this predication, this idea that if you can alter the world slightly in your fiction, you can also use that alteration to shine a light back on our present moment, to show how maybe the structure of things is arbitrary as well. We might do something different, or things could have been different.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Well, okay, I want to talk about this, because this alteration you have in science fiction, I think, also, in turn, can influence reality. Waree and Tus, there's a scene where Damira wakes in the connectome and speaks through thinking her words.
Love that, by the way. It made me realize that if this was possible, we would have to find another term for saying someone was dead or killed because their conscious was still active. And then you did do this, though. You invent a term for the people use called the returned. I was wondering your thoughts on this.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think so.
One of the really neat things about science fiction is that it does have this kind of feedback loop back into. Into science and into culture. Right. So you do get these things, these moments when science fiction can help come up with a term for something that we don't have a term for yet. Right. We can come up with things like the multiverse. Right. You can come up with things like alternate, like, what is it, you know?
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Well, I think is metaverse. That was used by Neil Stevenson.
Yeah, right.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: Metaverse. Right.
The nets. Right. Wasn't the whole concept of, like, the Internet sort of also fleshed out in some ways, you know, in science fiction before, some of those. Some of the elements of it really exist in the real world and then a whole lot of things that didn't ever happen in the real world, too. Right. But there is this kind of reciprocal relationship where scientists pick up on terms from science fiction and use them in their own work and they become real world terms, which is neat, but I think it's a little bit of a sideshow. Right? Like, I don't think it's. It's not the core of what science fiction is doing, but it is a cool, fun, off like offshoot of it.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
There are three narratives in Tus, one which involves Damira, who has her consciousness upload in a mammoth to help the population of mammoths learn how to be mammoths. The hunter son, who faces novel poacher son, who faces an awful tragedy, but eventually sides with Dimira, then Vladimir, who has accompanied his husband on hunting expedition four mammoth.
There are three simultaneous narratives also in the mountain, in the sea. When you start plotting out the structure of these novels, did you always imagine having three stories built into it?
[00:18:29] Speaker A: That's funny. There are three in both books. So I am writing a book now, and there are more than three. So now that I do not always do only three things, but I do think in a little bit of a triadic sort of way, I think just because for me, there have to be at least three different points of view in a way, because two points of view always seem oppositional. But adding the third point of view really complicates things. It gives you a sense that there are gray areas and limits in perception and, you know, ideas that you. It makes you suspect maybe that there's a much wider sort of set of perspectives out there. So for me, it's important to show the ways that perspective alters our sense of reality. It's a very different world, and I mean, that kind of in an almost mystical sense. Right. It's a very different world for one character than it is for another. Right. Even though they might be in the same place and time, their concerns are completely different, and the capacities that they think they have are completely different. And point of view, I think, is probably one of our most important and complicating factors in existence on the planet.
Right.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: What I like, though, is you also, there's something I noticed with the character of Damir and the poacher's son is that they do both mirror each other in their backgrounds. They both build a person around an object that was gifted to them by someone who was close to them. Dimira has the stuffed elephant, and then the son, whose name I've probably butcher, has a memory he wants to preserve. His mother talk about maps and most significantly, about Corsica. Was this intentional in the mirroring of their characters and their backgrounds? To me, it helped build sympathy for both of them because I saw both of them as each other.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, I'm thinking back. I'm trying to be honest in answering this question. I'm not sure that it was completely intentional.
But, you know, I think that when I'm. When I'm creating a character, I'm drawing on my own experience as a kid.
And, you know, I find that memories, in a sense, are formed a little bit in the way that a pearl is formed sometimes. Like there is an object or an event, a thing that happens that you kind of hold onto and you sort of wrap up in this shell of further interpretations until it really takes on this kind of. Of meaning for you. I think of, you know, for me, just like things that happened in my childhood that later come to be almost like stories that you tell yourself, like a sort of myth about where you came from. An origin story. Right. In a sense. And it seems to me to be a common way of forming an identity is to use these things as a way of grounding yourself. Right. And so I think in that way, the mirroring comes somewhat from them, just both being a part of my own experience. That being said, those things are invented, particular instances. But maybe their ways of looking at their memories are both a little bit like mine in the way that they kind of seek to preserve this one moment or their identity grows out of these. Out of these moments of things that happened as a child.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: My last question for you, Ray. What are you working on next, and what can we expect to see it?
[00:22:35] Speaker A: So, yeah, I have just actually, I signed the contract, and everything is moving forward for the next novel, and it will be very different from. From these two. These two books, but I think it takes up a lot of the same concerns about. About identity and things like that. I don't want to spill too much. I feel like there's this kind of magical moment where, like, no one knows what your next book is about, and I don't want to ruin it for.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: People special and precious. Yeah, I totally understand that.
[00:23:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. But I. But I do think that, you know, I could say this.
It will not focus on an animal in the way that the first two did, because I don't want to just become, you know, the guy who writes books about animals, but it will focus on a lot of the political, intellectual identity, and sort of, you know, consciousness concerns that these first two books focused on. So I'm not abandoning any of my thematic concerns, but I will be moving a little bit away in this particular book from focusing on the animal world as much as I have in these two.
[00:23:46] Speaker B: Whatever you do, I will keep your eye on your work. I'd love to bring you back on the show to talk about it.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Absolutely. I'd love to be back.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: This is my time to talk to Ray Naylor about his new novel, the Tusk of extinction. That will be out on January 16, I believe.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: Okay. And it'll be out then. Ray, thanks so much for your time.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you, Josh.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: And now this.
