The Big Idea behind Ten Directions

Transcript below:

After I wrote the short story I thought, well, if I'm gonna write a book, a bigger book, what's it about?

So I thought, well, what are the two stories that we have of our future?

We have one where technology solves every problem, and we're just out beaming up, warping out,and shooting across the galaxy, and there's nothing. There are no barriers, there are no connections, there is nothing holding us down.

And then the flip side of that is that our technology destroys us, and it's Mad Max and we're out in the desert trying to stay alive because it's all gone pear shaped. Really, having just those two ways of looking at the future seems somewhat inadequate.

I know Kristy said [Ten Directions is about] what will happen if we don't get our act together. But actually, I think my book is essentially quite hopeful in that we do manage to muddle our way through; that's the setting of the book at the very beginning.

So we've worked our way through some pretty huge problems that we've created for ourselves with global warming, and other sorts of environmental and ecological overshoot, and other sorts of problems that we've created on our planet with inequity and inequality. So many problems. But we've reorganized ourselves and we've worked our way through. That's a given at the beginning of the book.

So we're still suffering a lot from those choices that we've made in the past, but we found a way to sort through it, and into the middle of that comes a new technology.

It's something that hasn't been seen before. We can play out the same issues that we're dealing with in contemporary society with that new technology.

That was my essential vision and plan for the book.