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Annalee Newitz : My fandom started with giant monster picture show which I could actually watch on TV as a kid . And my early honey was Kaiju . I was very Godzilla identified , but then I became very King Ghidorah identified . I call Ghidorah just Ghidorah , because we ’re very close so I do n’t need to call Ghidorah king . Ghidorah is a three - headed space bird that defend Godzilla with lightning bolts because , obviously , a breath artillery of lightning is pretty great .
When I started play D&D , when I was a little bit elderly , I was very happy that they did have the polychromic dragon that had five breathing place weapons , one for each foreland . Those were my early fandoms . I came into it through monster , and then I quickly started reading science fiction books , which made my parent very sad , because they were English teachers and skill fiction was not literature . They keep say , “ Why do n’t you read lit ? You could read Hemingway . ” And I was like , “ But I want to read Ray Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin . ” And I just continued to be a unruly shaver in that way , and made a career out of it .
I know what your former fandom is .
Charlie Jane Anders : Oh , yeah ?
Annalee : Talk about it .
CJ : Oh , yeah ? When I was a small kid , I was really haunt with Doctor Who . And I was actually experience in England for a few years when I was a footling child , super little , just yay big . And at one point , we go away on a route trip . We rent a railway car and went on a road trip to this place in the middle of nowhere where they had a Doctor Who exposition where they fundamentally — they had the TARDIS , which is the Doctor ’s time - traveling phone stall for officer . And you go inside , and there is the giant ascendence cabinet with the six sides and the central thing going up and down . And you’re able to touch all the buttons and you’re able to , and I was really , really , really scared because I thought we were going to take off and leave Earth and be go forever and that … And then , they had a Dalek , and the Dalek was really talking and say hooey about how the Daleks were the master of the universe-
Annalee : Exterminate !
CJ : … and exterminate and all that . And I run outdoors and hid under a car . And I do n’t acknowledge how long I stay under that car , but I fundamentally omit the residual of the Doctor Who exhibition because I was hiding under a railroad car because I was so scared that we were going to take off and we were trapped in there with a Dalek .
Doctor Who was just extremely real to me back then , and still is , really , in a weird way . And later , I travel to conventions . When I was still pretty young , they had Doctor Who conventions and they had Star Trek normal , and some of the player would show up , and you could be like , “ That ’s that guy from that episode . ” But getting to see a Dalek up near and personal when I was extremely young , that was a formative memory for me , for sure . CJ : Nerd civilisation is awesome .
Annalee : The affair I love about being a sports fan is that I constantly have raw awesome thing to take and check . Actually , that ’s the expletive of being a fan , too , because I have a huge muckle of to read books and I have a huge queue of shows that I involve to look on . But the joy of being a fan is that you get to partake it with everyone , and when I have feel I can just go on the internet and necessitate other multitude about their feelings . Sometimes that take us to a dark place , but a lot of the time it just becomes a means of us sharing an experience and thinking about what narratives mean for us and what it means that we feel about the future and where we need things to go .
CJ : Yeah . I intend , I think the awesome thing about being a fan , for me , is the conversations that I have with other lover . And moderately much , the matter that always brought me back to fandom over the years was this residential district and this affair of everybody discuss the same thing and having different viewpoints and having unlike idea . And when I was really stick into comics , that was a big thing that made me lie with comics more , was that you could go on the internet and there would be the great unwashed look back the comical playscript , there ’d be people arguing about it , there ’d be substance board .
really , when we lead off doing io9 , that was a big thing that I really require us to becharm , was that matter of the debate and the back and forth and the trying to figure out what ’s coming next . And just that intense conversation about pappa culture . And I felt our scuttlebutt part on io9 was always where we had some of the near conversation and some of the most interesting exchanges about what does this mean and why do we bed this , what ’s this about , and stuff .
Annalee : A mess of the fandom in science fabrication and fantasy is based around the idea of read or experiencing escapist stories , stories that take you out of reality and put you in another stead , whether that ’s a darker post or a happy place . But fandom is actually about taking that escape and bringing it back into the substantial public by make a fan residential district . And I think that ’s why , especially now , we ’re check so many political motion within fandom . And right wing movements , but also left annex movements . Because the human activity of building that community around share stories is , in some sentiency , a political act .
Annalee : io9 came about because I had an IM conversation with Nick Denton [ founder of Gawker Media , now Gizmodo Media Group ] . And he go up me and asked if I would be interested in doing a skill fiction web log . And I , at first , thought that that mean that it would be just come out culture stuff , a Comic - Con case thing . Imagine if you had Comic - Con but as a web log . And he and I tossed some theme back and forth about that , and he keep tell , “ No , I do n’t need this to just be popular culture . I want it to be art . I want it to be futurism . ” And I was like , “ Okay , if we ’re go to make something like that , I require it to be science too . I desire science to be in there just as much , ” in the same agency that Omni powder magazine , which really inhale me , had a mix of skill and skill fiction .
Charlie was our first hire .
CJ : I signify , I had to contend with some other people . We had a back and away , and there was a whole process where , for almost six months , we had a secluded web log that nobody could read . It was called blogging in the dark , and we were just write blog posts on a parole - protected site that nobody could access except for us and Nick Denton and a few other people . And it was just hear to get the tone , judge to get the feeling of it .
We were live in a creation that skill fiction had predicted . That mean that science fiction was no longer this recess musical genre , but that it was the story of the world that we know in — and that that , in bend , meant that talking about science fiction should n’t be aimed at a niche hearing , it should be aimed at everybody , because everybody loves science fabrication now . Which is even more true now than it was 10 years ago .
Annalee : We wanted to have a vision of the futurity for our readers that was n’t entirely wacky but that was n’t hopeless and dystopian . And again , part of track science was very important to that because it was about how our stories could really infect reality in a good path , and that what we dream can come true and that scientific discipline and scientific discipline fiction are part of the same undertaking , which is to increasingly amend reality for the maximum number of people .
CJ : to begin with , we were hired to save a blog called Futurista , which sounds a little bit like barista and sounds a little chip like Sandinista . I think it was supposed to be a trendy - sounding name , Futurista . And that was ‘ cause it was about futuristic stuff and futurism . It sounds like fashionista , I judge . It sounds like you ’re being fashionable and futurist , and that’s-
Annalee : Trendy futurism .
CJ : precisely . And that was a cool name . And literally , I think the main problem was we could n’t get the URL .
Annalee : We gave up on that , and we did go through a caboodle of different potential names , and we still could n’t find anything that sounded nerveless and original . We desire something that would be just something that no one had heard before , something that citizenry did n’t have an association with . I turn to my friend , this hacker named Gordon Lyon , who created Nmap , which is a really significant software program tool . And he , in his unornamented time , when he ’s not doing port scanning , he is a domain name speculator .
He had this domain , io9.com . And we were like , “ Well , that voice techy . It sounds like the name of a lunar month , and it ’s really unforesightful so people will remember it , it wo n’t be unmanageable , ” which , of track , then subsequently after we had bought it and launch it , we discovered that , two thing : One , actually io9 is really hard for people to understand , and they could n’t figure out if it was I letter of the alphabet o number 9 , and it was very complex for people . But also , we discovered that the former possessor of io9 had been a porno spam guy and that the domain of a function was in doubled penalty box at Google … It took us several months before the great unwashed could even find io9 at all .
Annalee : The site became very democratic very quickly , and it was rewarding even though we were starving ourselves and not sleeping and stuff . It matte up we were part of something that was growing , and the commenter community of interests was so awesome . And it just feel … I do n’t know , it felt like we were onto something . I ’d always want a blog like io9 to exist . I always wanted a central place for sci - fi news and science newsworthiness , and it was suddenly , “ Yay , it exists ! ”
CJ : I mean , we made a circle of mistake the entire time , because we were always stress new stuff and nonsense and we were always throwing clobber out there . And just sometimes it would blow up in our face , and we ’d be like , “ Okay , so that did n’t work , ” but-
Annalee : Luckily , only a few million people find out it .
CJ : We were constantly just judge to press the boundary of what we could do on this site in full term of what essay we could do , what evergreen plant features we could do , and just weird , “ What ’s the biggest explosion that ’s ever materialise in scientific discipline fiction ? ” Trying to assess the size of dissimilar plosion in fictional story . Just clobber like that . We were forever trying to derive up with unearthly new stuff . And the more people we land onboard , the more unearthly ideas we had . We added Esther Inglis - Arkell , who would do these madly geeky , very offbeat , weird scientific discipline stories .
And then , we ’d have Meredith Woerner indite really flow - of - consciousness recaps of goggle box shows . And that was the matter that was fun about being at Gawker Media , peculiarly at that meter , is that there was very much encouragement to experiment and a drive to experiment and press thing as far and as many different directions as you could .
Annalee : One of the things I hump was that we were encouraged to be eldritch and to be uttermost , if we wanted to , and to have cognitive content that no one else would have . And my backcloth in journalism , I set out in alternate media . And to me , that experience like abode , someone saying to me , “ Yeah , it ’s okay to say fuck in a newspaper headline . In fact , if you ’re not doing that you ’re just bonk up . ” And I now appraise all jobs based on that .
Annalee : I guess one of my favorite moments was , I write a lot about archeology , and I had written this story about the Inca and their deficiency of an economical system . I mean , they had an economic organisation , but it was n’t anything like modern economical system . It was based on , basically , food taxation . There was no money . And it seems there were no market place in Inca cities , which is super uncanny , especially if you come at it from either an Asian or European perspective . There ’s always a marketplace at the center of a city . And archaeologist were like , “ What the blaze is this ? ”
One of the things I ’m really proud of that we did is , I experience we modeled really good community of interests . And part of that had to do with , from the outset , making certain that our staff was gender balanced , as much as we could … That was key to creating a community where , I think , a spate of cleaning woman feel they could actually come in and talk about geeky material and that they would n’t be drowned out , they would n’t be explained to . And I ’ve had a lot of people who were io9 commenters say to us , “ Wow , this is like a amazingly friendly place . ” And it is n’t that people did n’t have fights . People did have vast debates , really vivid public debate , peculiarly about Batman .
CJ : I mean , the matter I ’m proudest of , in retrospect , with io9 in general is that we had this thing where we would render to have appreciation of pop culture and then a really recondite , unstinting critique of the aspects of it that were blemished or problematic or had return . And we would seek to do both , and we would n’t make you choose . And I feel a lot of the sentence , even nowadays , there ’s this thought that you may only do one or the other . you could bonk it or you could pick apart it , but you ca n’t do both . And we would really hear to , very consciously , to make a space for both of those thing .
One of the examples that come to mind is the movie Avatar from 2009 , where I wrote the review and I intend my review was largely upbeat and positive . And then , a duet of Day later , Annalee wrote an essay about how Avatar was a white phantasy or a white savior fantasy .
Annalee : My headline was , “ When will white people turn back make picture show like Avatar ? ” Which , a great deal of white people were very upset that I necessitate that question .
CJ : Right .
Annalee : I do n’t know if they fuck that they ’d been making those movies , but … I do n’t jazz .
CJ : ‘ Cause it was a Dances with Wolves thing . It was —
Annalee : Yeah , no . It was a white Jesus movie . Especially now , I do n’t think anybody would argufy that . The ashen dude derive in and dresses up like a gamey person and saves the blasphemous masses . It ’s blue human face , straight up .
And then , there was the amazing essay that Charlie wrote about Transformers 2 , called , “ Michael Bay at last Made an Art Film . ” And she did this Gonzo analysis of the film , dissemble that it was great avant - garde art-
CJ : It was .
Annalee : … and it broke the internet . Yes , it was great avant - garde art . It ’s true that it had very little narrative structure , it was full of spectacle and-
CJ : It was full of really-
Annalee : Nonsensical phrases … We did a Comic - Con panel that class . We started doing io9 Comic - Con panels , and when I introduced Charlie , I said , “ And she ’s the author of the Transformers 2 essay . ” And everybody was like , “ Yay ! ” People just have a spate of feelings about Michael Bay .
CJ : I stand for , I personally want to see io9 become the centre of a vast galactic imperium , maybe with armies of quad squids and flotillas of just flying cyborgs with arms and legs that can shoot out on rockets and spread out overconfident quivering and geeky conversation wherever they fly out into space . And I mean same for geek culture . I reckon eccentric acculturation should have more missile arm and legs , for certain .
Annalee : I ’m really not interested in arm and eccentric culture .
CJ : Well , it ’s irrefutable vibe .
Annalee : I ’m hop that io9 continues to flourish , or that , at least , io9 ’s progeny continue to thrive . We ’ve already taken over all of medium . That ’s a good head start . And I do mean that the next phase angle is credibly planetary domination and then , peradventure just the inner planet would be o.k. . Jupiter is the full major planet , and that is n’t technically an inner major planet . possibly we could just stretch it out to there . I ’m really hoping that flake civilization , over the next decade , becomes less distinctively geek civilisation and more part of just what we think of as pop culture or scientific culture , because I recollect a lot of the thing that we have historically associated with geekiness , like rationality and belief in scientific explanations for reality really require to be part of just public cultivation .
I ’m really glad that it ’s still going . I ’m extremely lofty of it . I cogitate the people working on it are fantastic , and it ’s been , really , a delight to see people who ’ve come through io9 . And io9 graduates have gone on to do all kinds of really coolheaded material . I mean , I ’m really majestic , and it ’s awesome . We make a great golem giant .
Annalee NewitzanniversaryCharlie Jane Anders
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