Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today we’re taking a break from science fact to talk about some recent science fiction. My guest is journalist, editor and author Annalee Newitz. You may know some of their nonfiction titles like Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. But their journalistic research on science and technology has also fueled popular fiction titles like The Future of Another Timeline and, one of my personal favorites, Automatic Noodle. It takes place in a post-war San Franscisco and features a bunch of robots starting their own noodle restaurant. It’s really wonderful, you should check it out.
Anyway, Annalee is here today to talk about their latest book, A Wall Is Also a Road. It’s a genre-bending odyssey featuring sentient slime molds, ancient Roman sex workers and extraterrestrial academics who prove that, no matter how alien your physiology may be, the stress of working on a dissertation is completely universal.
Annalee, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us today
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Annalee Newitz: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Feltman: So I wanna talk about your latest book. I’m really, really enjoying it. I think it pulls a lot from your background as a science writer who’s written a lot of nonfiction. So I would love to just start with how this idea first started.
Newitz: So this is 100 percent me cribbing off my own nonfiction work. I published a book a couple of years ago called Four Lost Cities, which deals, in part, with Pompeii and how it was that the city was buried in ash, obviously, but also how people survived—because, in fact, one of the things that I think isn’t discussed very often is the fact that most of the people in the city were able to evacuate. There were, of course, many, many tragedies, and a lot of people did die. But it’s actually a really great example of what now we would consider to be, like, a modern rescue operation.
And people resettled throughout the region, and I had spent an enormous amount of time thinking about Pompeii. I visited the city. I visited Herculaneum. I hung out with a lot of archaeologists—to the point where I’m sure I may have overstayed my welcome at their digs. And I kept thinking about the ordinary people who had lived at Pompeii, like, not the fancy people that we always hear about but just people who survived, who just did it by literally walking out of the city.
Feltman: Hmm.
Newitz: And one of them is this woman, Murtis. We don’t know if she survived, but she did leave her name on the wall at the lupanar, the purpose-built brothel in the city. And there’s this really terrific scholar, Sarah Levin-Richardson, at the University of Washington, who’s written a lot about the lupanar and also the lives of sex workers.
And so she wrote this great article about Murtis and the graffiti that she left behind praising her own skills as a cocksucker, and why it was that we, kind of, know that women were leaving this graffiti. It wasn’t just, like, men saying things. And I kept wondering about Murtis. She sounded like someone that I would meet here in San Francisco who would be kind of ironically talking about how sexy she was. So I couldn’t let her go, and I finally was like, “All right. I need her to be one of the main characters in a novel.” And I brought her to life in this book, along with some of the other women who we know lived in Pompeii, like Julia Felix, who owned a massive shopping and bath complex, as well as a boarding house.
There’s some other women—like, Eumachia makes an appearance, for those of you who have the deep cut of knowing who that is. She’s another rich lady who left her name on a lot of buildings. And I’m a science-fiction writer, so it made perfect sense to me that the way we would meet Murtis would be a graduate student who is an alien slime mold who’s doing their fieldwork there in Rome.
And, actually, they don’t intend to be studying humans at all. They’re on Earth to study the ecosystem. They’re looking for single-celled organisms because they’re a single-celled organism. And so when they find humans, they’re kind of like, “What the heck is this?” [Laughs.]
Feltman: Yeah. Could you tell listeners who aren’t familiar with slime molds a little bit about why they’re so cool and interesting to us?
Newitz: Wow. Okay. Well, so slime molds are kind of the charismatic microfauna, maybe, of the universe as we know it. So they’re not a fungus; they’re not a plant; they’re not an animal. They’re a protist, meaning, you know, they’re, like, kind of like amoebas. They’re more closely related to amoebas than, like, a fungus, even though we think of slimes and funguses as being kind of the same thing.
And some slime molds, they exhibit a lot of the hallmarks of sentience. They can solve puzzles. You know, if you put them in a maze, and you put food outside the maze, they actually will solve the maze to get to the food.
Feltman: Right. I know there’s been some research looking at, like, using them to find the most efficient path or a layout for a network because they’re so good at finding food in mazes.
Newitz: Yeah. There was a paper about how slime molds may have solved the traveling salesman problem. And they also have these interesting life cycles where they go from being single-celled organisms to multicellular and back again sometimes. They’re a life-form that we barely understand. They’re very diverse, very beautiful but also sometimes super gross-looking to humans. I mean, I think they’re all very beautiful, but, you know, they’re slimy, especially when they group together in, in large quantities. So I think that what is exciting about them really is the fact that they seem to have these hallmarks of consciousness, even though they’re so different from us.
Feltman: Yeah, so one of the things about your book that I think is such a delight and going to delight lovers of science fiction is that you clearly did so much work to have this character that is so alien, from a human perspective, be the point of view character and see Earth and humans as alien, as we would see this character. I would love for you to just talk a little bit about what that process was like and what made you decide to have a character who was such an interesting person and so not a human being.
Newitz: I mean, the thing that’s fun about this character, whose name is Gardenpath, is that they are physically very different from us. They’re a single-celled organism. They are based on a slime mold, and I did talk to a slime mold biologist to, you know, get some evidence-based, uh, descriptions of slime molds. They are very alien, but at the same time, they’re in grad school, and their grad school system, in this floating university outside of our galaxy, is quite recognizable. And so I think one of the things that is fun about it is that if you’ve at all been in academia or read about academia, you will recognize the kind of social structure.
But at the same time, we have these students who, you know, they don’t have ears or mouths as we know them, so if they wanna communicate, they’re doing it using cellular signaling, which I think I’ve always been fascinated by that mechanism, how our cells and our bodies talk to each other basically using chemicals and hormones and ions. You know, using communication that’s very, very different from ours, and so that’s what these guys are doing, and they have receptors all over the surfaces of their membranes, and they use those to communicate emotions, words, philosophies. They can reach inside of each other to communicate, which, again, is, is not totally unlike how a slime mold might communicate with another slime.
One of the things, again, that I love about slime molds—because who doesn’t love slime molds?—is that in their life cycles, many of them go from being a single-celled organism to joining up with other single cells to become, sometimes they’re called slugs. They, kind of, become multicellular, sometimes to reproduce but sometimes just to walk around and find food.
And so my guys do that. Like, that’s their sleep cycle, is that during periods when they need to detox, basically, they merge together. And for me, it’s just really gratifying after spending many, many years writing about biology and writing about these things from a very human perspective. I just wanted to know, like, how would the cells be feeling about cellular communication, and what would it be like to be somebody who spent part of your life as an individual and part of your life merged into a larger entity?
Those are the kinds of questions that animate me you know I, as a journalist, of course, I strive to be as factual as possible, but then my head still fills with all these thoughts like, “What if every cell in our bodies is actually, like, an entity that’s an individual?” Or like, “What if slime molds actually have an advanced civilization?” You know, probably they don’t, but maybe they do. And so that, this is what I imagine they would be like.
Feltman: So obviously, you talk to scientists all the time for your work, and that informed a lot of this. But I, I saw in your acknowledgments that you ran this by a few experts, and that, that got me curious. You know, how did you balance, sort of, pulling from actual biology versus letting things go and putting your own spin on them for the sake of the plot and the story?
Newitz: That’s a really good question, and I think, for me as a writer, I like having hard limits on my imagination. I’m one of those people who hates, like, holodeck episodes on Star Trek because anything can happen. So what I tend to do is use the science as much as possible as a guardrail.
Feltman: Hmm.
Newitz: And so, for instance, the slime mold characters who call themselves the rational people, they live in the circumgalactic medium, which is a gas cloud that surrounds our galaxy. And I interviewed Molly Peeples, who’s a cosmologist who studies the circumgalactic medium, and we talked a lot about, like, the density of gas, the temperatures, what kinds of resources would be out there. Like, would there be water? Would there be metals? And it turns out, like, there’s planets and stars so they got whole little micro galaxies out there.
So to me, that provided a really great world to put my characters [in] because they actually have resources out there. But at the same time, you know, there’s a lot of stuff they don’t have: for example, intense gravity wells, like, all of the radiation that we deal with all the time inside the galactic plane.
So I guess, like, the answer to that question is: I try to be as accurate as possible, but then the thing about science is: there’s all of these areas that are, kind of, the dark matter of what we know, you know? There’s just stuff we don’t know, and so that’s where I get to come in and say, like, “Well, this is what it might be like to live out there,” or, “If a cellular slime mold were conscious, this is kind of how it would feel.” That’s all the stuff we’re not allowed to do as science journalists, and so it’s really fun to kind of break the rules and, and fill in all those gaps with my own ideas.
Feltman: Definitely. What are some of your favorite aspects of, you know, this type of life and culture that you created for the book?
Newitz: Well, I liked having the combination of this very alien civilization meeting Roman civilization because I feel like, as someone who writes a lot about archaeology, that I often do feel like an alien when I’m writing about a civilization that’s, like, 2,000 years old and has these recognizable elements but also so many cultural assumptions that are lost or very, very different from ours.
Feltman: Hmm.
Newitz: And so I liked the idea of, kind of, showing that to the reader and inviting readers to remember that human civilizations can also be so radically unlike ours today that we might as well approach them like aliens. And one thing that I speculated was that Murtis, our character who lives in Pompeii, wouldn’t really be fazed by the idea of meeting an alien because, at that time in history, you know, we hadn’t yet figured out what the stars were really. We hadn’t figured out everything that was on Earth. And so Gardenpath eventually is like, “Yeah, I’m kind of from beyond the stars, and I’m here studying.” And Murtis thinks it’s weirder that a woman is a scholar than that there’s a woman from beyond the stars visiting Pompeii, and she’s like, “Oh, well, are there Romans where you come from?” Like, because she lives in a world where Romans have kind of invaded everything.
Feltman: Hmm.
Newitz: And so I liked, you know, putting that stuff together and saying, like, "Well, actually, maybe in ancient Rome, you know, aliens would have seemed more ordinary than they would now."
Feltman: Right. Is it crazier than somebody who’s never heard of Rome? Like, somebody coming from the other side of the planet is as wild as somebody coming from the stars when you haven’t studied astrophysics, so....
Newitz: And when you couldn’t possibly have because nobody had been able to figure that stuff out at that level yet, you know? And of course, in Pompeii, it was such a cosmopolitan city that they would’ve had people from all over the place. People were coming from Africa, people were coming from Asia Minor, the Levant, like, Europe. So, you know, an alien is like, “Whatever.” That’s just, “Okay, you’re from beyond the stars—fine,” you know?
Feltman: Yeah. Why do you think it’s important for us to think about the idea of a consciousness that could be so different from ours and life that’s so different from what feels normal to us?
Newitz: I really think it’s important to question what we think of as normal or typical, and this is an idea that science and the scientific project have always taken really seriously. I mean, the thing that’s wonderful about science is that when it’s practiced in its most pure form, it’s about asking every possible question you can about everything around you and not taking anything for granted and not assuming that what seems normal now is actually what’s normal everywhere.
And so there’s something really beautiful about getting a chance to think about: What would a very different kind of consciousness be like? You know, what would it mean to acknowledge forms of thinking, forms of cognition, that don’t fit with what we have experienced as people, uh, on Earth or as humans on Earth, really, is what I should say.
There’s always a, kind of, sneaky undercurrent in my work because I write a lot about nonhuman consciousness, uh, in my fiction. And it’s, it’s really about trying to approach each other with more curiosity and more openness and to really approach, you know, other humans and think, “Oh, uh, even though they seem so different, maybe we have something in common, or maybe there’s just something beautiful or fascinating about how different this person is from me.”
Or a nonhuman animal. We’re learning more all the time about how much culture that nonhuman animals seem to have—you know, whales, elephants. I was just on a great website that has recordings of elephant communication, and there’s dozens and dozens of these vocalizations, I guess. But they’re communication, like, elephants are talking to each other, figuring out who’s gonna lead the pack today or where they’re gonna go.
And so for me, if I can invite readers to empathize with a slime mold, I really hope they can take that back out into the real world and maybe empathize with elephants or with just human beings who seem really different.
Feltman: Absolutely. I keep thinking about the aspect of the, the slime mold characters where their assigned dorm mates that they need to be glopped into a bowl with so that they can dissolve their membranes and all hang out together and how like, wow, that is, that is life, isn’t it? That people need each other, and sometimes you might not like someone, but the truth is: you gotta get glopped into the bowl with them. It’s gotta happen.
Newitz: You’re gonna have roommates, bad roommates, even if you live beyond the galaxy sometimes. [Laughs.] It’s a universal experience.
Feltman: Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk about the book. This has been great.
Newitz: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back on Friday for a fascinating conversation about the human mind’s capacity for uncertainty—and how you can improve your own brain’s ability to cope with chaos.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak, Allison Rodgers and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Marielle Issa and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. See you next time!