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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Today we're welcoming novelist Tom Lin back to the show, whose new novel, Babylon, South Dakota moves his fascination with the American west into stranger and more uncanny territory. A Chinese family moves to a new farm in South Dakota. After the government takes an interest in a plot near their home for some Cold War era experiments. The family's life gets much odder and much stranger. South Dakota's Cold War era setting gives the novel a chance to explore nuclear dread, government conspiracies, and an interest in the paranormal that's reminiscent of the viral in it phenomenon, the SCP Foundation. Tom was born in China and emigrated the United States when he was four. A graduate of Panoma College, he also holds a PhD from the University of California, Davis. His first novel, the Thousand Crimes of Ming sue, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, teaches English and Creative writing at the University of Iowa.
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C
So, Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show today. You know, maybe we should talk about this book by starting with your previous book, you know, the Thousand Crimes of Ming Sue. And people should go listen to that episode when that book came out a while ago.
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Thank you for having me. I'm back on the show. Yeah, so.
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C
But that book was kind of your spin on the traditional western story. How did you get from the Thousand Crimes of Ming sue to this book? Babylon, South Dakota.
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Yeah, so I. And it's good to be back. I think the last episode I was on maybe five years now. So I think it's been an eventful little stretch of time since then. But. So the first book is a kind of, is a Western with a Chinese American protagonist. And then this book is about a Chinese American immigrant family. And they both take place in kind of wide open spaces. And I think the way that I went from the first one to this one is I was doing my PhD research. I was writing a dissertation on science fiction and the development of nuclear missiles. And as a result, I was traveling to all of these missile silos. I was interviewing all these old rocket engineers. I was thinking very deeply about what it meant to live in a world that had been kind of restructured by this absolute power, which is the nuclear missile. And I was getting to a point where I just got stuck on my dissertation, just banging my head against a brick wall. And so I thought rather foolishly, now I Thought that I would ease my troubles a bit by starting a new fiction project that I could use. Whenever I got stuck on one thing that I could go work on that instead. And the result of that, which is fantastic, which was that I had two things that I could get stuck on equally at the same time. Um, and, and so then I, you know, I, I, I was working on that and at the same time my, my grandfather had, he had gotten Covid in 2020 and then he had kind of been in and out of the hospital, slowly declining with each iteration. Uh, and so around the time that I was working on the book, he was also kind of in, in, in his last few months and he began to, he had this, he had a tracheotomy tube and so he couldn't talk, so he could only write. And he would write totally. You usually write requests for ginger ale and would, you know, which we would give it. But, but towards, towards the end of his life he began to write really profound and astonishing things on, on little sheets of paper which were totally without explanation and you couldn't really ask follow up questions. And so one thing that he wrote was, was I feel original sin, which I, which I thought was totally baffling. And, and, and I really didn't know what to do with it. And, and I, and I had all these stories that he had told me, you know, when I was growing up and I had all my family stories as well. And I think him being in the hospital was making everyone in my family very nostalgic. And so they were all telling stories and I had this feeling of wanting to write something that could get all of my family stories into one place and have them be not only there and recorded, but also believable and have the texture of family stories and feel as familiar to a reader as they did to me. And I had this backdrop of nuclear missile research that I was doing for my PhD and I think all those things came together at just the right time. And I had the, the benefit of having an incredibly tough deadline that I had to meet. And so I think with that pressure on me and with all that stuff floating around in my brain, Babylon, South Dakota kind of formed itself.
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C
So, you know, people seem to have slotted this book a little bit in the same vein as your previous book is like, oh, it's another Western. But know, rather than being set in the traditional western period, you know, late 19th, early 20th century, this book is set during the Cold War or, you know, or like the Cold War through to the end of the Cold War. And yeah, it's a particularly surreal and supernatural version of it which we'll get to later. But kind of what was it about like this time period, you know, post war Cold War nuclear age that appealed to you in terms of wanting to set a story then?
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Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's a, it was a time of enormous tension.
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Right.
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And like, I think during the Cold War, especially during the height of the kind of nuclear saber rattling, there was this sense that like, like the going understanding was that there would be a thermonuclear exchange, it would end most the civilized like, like, you know, metropolitan areas on earth and we would be reduced to kind of bands of post apocalyptic scavengers essentially. And, and, and you know, you, you talk to people who, who remember growing up during that time and, and, and they go oh yeah, like, you know, we, we had the drills, we knew where the bomb shelters were. Like we, we expected in, in, in a real way to die by, by nuclear fire. And, and now, you know, I teach at the University of Iowa and I have a class which is, which is about nuclear fiction. And one of the first things that I have to do in that class is actually explain, you know, quite clearly that like nuclear weapons are still around. We still have many of them, they're still very much pointed at each other and they're still very much ready to go at a moment's notice. And I think it's surprising that something which was so total and, and almost, you know, it felt almost certain just 40 or 50 years ago has now become something that is, is easily forgotten when the thing itself has not been forgotten. And I think the, the whole feeling of, of the Cold War as being, you know, like there are, there are mysterious machinations just over the horizon which you can't perceive. There's senses of, of power which have, which have come to dominate your life, that you have no control over you. You are answering to forces which are beyond your recognition or comprehension. I think those are themes which have not disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but which have actually become incorporated into our daily life. Like I think, I think we are, we're always going to be perpetually in, in the kind of twilight of the Cold War, of this like paranoia and, and like, you know, statecraft that, that's involved, that has as its core this kind of threat of ultimate annihilation. And I think that's a really powerful milieu to set a story in because you have these characters which, which, whose lives become always Immediately in front of this backdrop of a global phenomenon or a global feeling.
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C
Let's talk a bit more about the actual setting of South Dakota. Talk a bit about kind of this location you've set the story in, which is this farm. The entire story kind of takes place on that property in South Dakota as kind of stuff kind of happens around it and in it, and it's. But tell us a bit more about kind of this particular location and what you want to convey kind of in, you know, in. In your choice of.
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Of.
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Of the setting.
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Yeah, I mean, I. I think of my first book, Ming sue, as being like movement through space, right, Where. Where the. The. The time that it covers is quite narrow, and we have our characters moving through great distances and across the deserts. And for the second book, I wanted to do a similar kind of journey, but through time instead. And so it is very localized. The characters hardly ever leave their little homestead in South Dakota, and they raise a daughter there, and then they have grandkids, even. But everything kind of takes place on this farm. And I think what I was interested in is this is to reproduce the sense of getting to know a place. And as for South Dakota specifically, I have always felt a great affinity to that state. I think it's one of those transitional states between the American Midwest, which is this kind of broad, rolling agricultural area, and. And, you know, the. Like the. The. The west as frontier, right. Like the Rockies and. And all those, like, classic high, high country vignettes. But South Dakota is right kind of in between. Like, in the east, it's very Midwestern. It's like fields. And then in the west, like, the land kind of rises up and it becomes the Black Hills. And so as you drive through it, which I've done many times, as you drive through it, it kind of becomes this narrative. You can see the land either calming down if you're going east, or you can see it kind of like waking up and beginning to rise if you're going west. And I think that feeling of being in a. In a place where we were between two states, right? And, you know, states in the sense of we're between, like, two ways of living, I think has always really struck me. And the other thing about South Dakota, of course, is that that is where we had many nuclear missile silos
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in
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the late, you know, 80s and 90s where nuclear missiles did sit there, and. And they were ready to go. And the control centers are still there. And you can go Visit Delta, Delta 0 and Delta 9, which are the national historical sites that have been preserved by the nps where you can go see the missile itself. You know, it's a mock missile, but you can go see it in the silo. You can go down at the control center. And so the state has this legacy of being totally nuclearized, and at the same time, it was nuclearized because war planners looked at it and said, well, not a lot of people live there. And. And that is a place that we can use to absorb enemy nuclear missiles because they'll aim at the silos. And every missile that they aim at South Dakota is a missile. They don't aim at New York or Atlanta or. Or Houston. And so I. I wanted, you know, all. It's. It's a state of contradictions. And I think it was a very useful setting to place this story which. Which has these Chinese immigrants who are trying to find their way in America and. And. And build a life while all these things are happening around them. I mean, I think it is a place which seems to be very tranquil until you wait there for even more than a couple of hours and you realize how much stuff is really going on.
- [10:49]
C
Well, you talked about kind of. You want. Is the. The people that live there. And so let's kind of talk about the family at the center of this story. You know, Saul and May, who are the grandparents there's. There. Well, the first generation. Then you have Mara, who's the second generation, the third generation. And one thing that kind of struck me is that, you know, while Saul and May are from China, the book isn't particularly interested in dwelling on that point, kind of, apart from a few references to the old country and maybe kind of May's particular attachment to gold. But I wonder if you might talk a bit more kind of about. About this family and how you kind of put these different characters together.
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Yeah, I mean, I think part of that. That feeling of not wanting to be fixated on. On the old country, I think, is, I think, immigrant stories or immigrant narratives,
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the way that we.
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We think of them in. In kind of the popular conception, they're always stories of. Of privation and recovery. I mean, in the sense that, like, you know, you. They always seem to be stories of. Of so. And so was a neurosurgeon, and then. And then they immigrated and now they're. They're delivering pizzas. And. And so the story has. It becomes, in a way, the triumph of recovery. Which is. Which is that the. The. It seems that, like, the successful or the satisfying immigrant story ends up being one where a character recovers something that they have lost by their immigration. And I think, like. And that's certainly a valid story, and I think that certainly is. It strikes true for. For. For many experiences, but I think at the same time, it conceals this. This other half of it, which is what would. Like. Like, for what reason do. Do people leave everything that they have known and move to a new country just to start all over again? And I think moving the focus from. From, you know, where. Where Solon may come from to where they've ended up choosing to stay, I think is my way of re. Articulating the immigrant narrative as. As a. As a desire narrative rather than a recovery narrative, right? Where. Where there is something that they want and. And there is something that they want to do here in this new country that is informed by their past in the old country, but not necessarily beholden to. As. As immigrants who have lost status or power or wealth in the old country. And the characters themselves are amalgams of, you know, my family members, every people that I've met. I think. I forget who said this, but. But I think writers are like magpies in that we. We steal, but we steal in ways which are, like, not harmful. We. I think it's recombinatory. You know, I'll take a story from my grandparents and I'll see if I can place it into a context where it makes more sense. Or, you know, I'll take something like. Like a little habit that. That my mother has, and then I'll. I'll see if I can build it into a character just starting from that habit. And there was. There was a point at which the characters that you're building finally come to life and. And begin pushing back on the plot or the. The kind of situations that you want to put them in. And that's when, you know, at least for me, that's when I knew that the book was gonna be done. Because I think prior to that point where you're just still building the characters and still making the. Making them kind of. You're still puppeting them. It feels as though you are dragging the story out of something. And once you hit critical mass and the characters become their own people, it really takes off on its own, and you feel that you are allowing them to speak rather than forcing them to.
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C
So I wonder if you might do a short reading from your book kind of before we start talking about some of the more supernatural and spookier stuff in the book. I wonder if you might kind of take a few minutes just to read a section of the book for us.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. So I've picked out a section which comes quite early on. So Saul and May, they've been in America for a couple of years and their daughter Mara is at this point almost 10, and she is. Is a huge animal lover. She can actually talk to animals, but no one believes her.
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C
But.
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But it is. But it is true. And one day Saul comes back and Mara's not there. He goes out to kind of look for her, and she's in the chicken coop because overnight a coyote has actually broken into the coop and eaten one of her chickens, one of her beloved hens. And so they and so this is where the scene begins. He's still out there, mara said quietly, and something in her tone made Saul shiver. He raised his flashlight to his temple and scanned the distant hillsides, watching for a retinal flash. Nothing. I think he's gone for now, saul said. Come on, let's get home. He pocketed his flashlight, pulled Mara close, and together they started back toward the truck. Hey, he said after they got in. Chin up. We'll get another hen in town tomorrow and we'll have chicken for dinner. No. Mara cried. We have to bury her. Don't be silly, kid. I'm not letting a perfectly fine bird go to waste. He reached to grab the chicken back, and to his surprise, Mara jerked it out of his grasp in a swirl of feathers. Mara, he said, voice hardening. Don't be silly. If we bury her here, the coyote will just come back and dig her up. Mara hugged the hen closer. Then we'll have to bury her somewhere else. Saul did not know what to say or do. The air was cooling and thickening into a dense fog, choke damp, settling down into the hollows and ruts. Alright, saul said. Fine. We'll bury her. He watched his daughter's face for relief and found none. Mara squeezed her eyes tightly together and shook her head. She was beginning to cry. She's in hell now, isn't she? Mara said quietly. She is. I know it. There's no such thing, saul said. He put the truck in gear and down they went toward the windbreak, silhouettes of the aspens bending in sequence as a stymied breeze rolled over their crowns. Saul felt a gnawing and inescapable unease, as though the ghost of the coyote were stalking just beyond the fences of his comprehension. He glanced up at the rearview mirror, looking at the dim glow of the silo's floodlights in the distance, and abruptly was seized by an urge to drive away from it as fast as he could to gun the engine until the truck rolled off the beveled edge of the earth. When they arrived back at the house a short while later, May was standing outside with a flashlight waiting for them, and she shrieked at the sight of her daughter covered in blood. After hearing, to her immense relief, that her daughter had not been the one mauled, May told Mara to change out of her bloody clothes and set them to soak overnight in a tub of brine so the stain would not set. Saul put the chicken in a paper bag and tucked it into the freezer. In the morning, when they were finished with their chores, they retrieved the stiff and frozen chicken and drove out to the windbreak while Mara dug a hole in the soft dirt between the windbreak and the access road. Saul tried fruitlessly to peel the paper bag from the dead hen and finally gave up. On her hands and knees with her face nearly touching the ground, Mara lowered the small icy package to the bottom of the hole. Sol and May filled in the grave and tamped down the disturbed soil until until it was nearly level with the earth. Mara folded her hands in front of her and said that Susie had been a good hen who had always been loved and who would be missed dearly, and when Mara was finished speaking, Saul turned to Mae to tell her something, but before he could get a word out, Mae said in a soft voice, you're crying. I'm going to baptize them all, mara said. You'll be late for school, may said. Not now, mara said. But I'm going to. Her voice was firm. I just need to ask Nancy if I'm supposed to say something different for animals. Mara's resolve did not waver when Nancy promised to ask her parents whether the souls of chickens and goats and rabbits and cattle could be saved as those of men, despite her hunch that they would say no. And neither did Mara's spirits flag the following morning when Nancy repeated what her parents had said, that it was not only absurd to suggest that animals be baptized but that it was altogether blasphemous, a word which the girls had to look up in the unabridged dictionary and whose definition impiously irreverent required two further lookups before they could say they understood its meaning. But why would that be blasphemous? Mara said. Because animals don't have souls, nancy offered. What's a soul? Well, nancy said, I'll have to ask my parents about that. The afternoon air that day was rich and so perfectly suited to human creatures that holding still in the sunlight, uninterrupted by so much as a moat of dust, Mara could not tell where her own body ended and that of the world began. It was a feeling of complete continuity, the destruction of that threshold which had always interceded between her undefined soul and the joyous breaking out of the world. Between this harmony of living, she felt the grit of Nancy's impossible claim grinding down into a fine and silken dust. She knew animals had souls, and so she resolved to begin with the chickens, since one of their number had already died without hope of salvation, and upon returning home she went immediately to their coop to begin her crusade. As her parents watched with mild amusement and small concern, Mara dragged a galvanized trough into the center of the chicken coop and filled it with dark water. With an attitude of businesslike determination, she set about catching the chickens and baptizing them one after the other until she had finally caught the 14th and last hen in a wild tangle of feathers and clucking. She held the bird's knobby feet together in her small fist as its wings cut loudly through the air, and squinting through the rising dust, she said, just as Nancy had taught her, I baptize you, Missy, the hen, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and then dunked the poor animal into the water before letting it go squawking and shrieking to join its damp comrades in the roost, where it sulked for three days with its feathers puffed up and its eyes narrowed in an indignant squint. Only after a half hour of wheedling was May able to dissuade her daughter from continuing to baptize the larger animals, which would have been not only physically improbable for the little girl of almost 10, but also poor husbandry, since the animals would have certainly caught cold overnight. And even though Nancy had said it did not count unless the sinner was cleansed head to toe, she had also said that animals were without souls, which was so obviously wrong as to put the rest of her theologies in doubt. In the end, Mara staggered around the barn until well after sunset, dragging a pail of water around and baptized the larger creatures as her father had baptized her, tossing handfuls of water over their heads while they shrank away from her frightful zeal and huddled in the corners of their stalls. At last, in the evening, she returned to the house, dusty and exhausted, her fingers reddened by the weight of the bucket handle, and said that she had saved them all, even and especially Rascal, the old Mule, who had brayed so loudly when the water struck his snout that Mara had dashed another few handfuls over his furious head, that she might expel every last ounce of his devilish burden. Her voice had been reduced to a hoarse whisper by all her baptismal shouting. And in this thin and residual speech, she rasped triumphantly, I did it. I did it. They're saved.
- [21:08]
C
Kind of in, in the, in the lead up to that reading, you, you kind of make a brief mention that at this point, Mara has the ability to talk to animals. And that's one of the more, let's say, benign versions of the supernatural and stuff that starts to happen on the farm as the book continues, it gets a lot weirder and a lot more, you know, a lot more insidious from that. So, you know, as the book starts to take this more supernatural turn partway through, I mean, how did you want to kind of weave those elements into the story?
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A
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm a fan of the supernatural. I also included it a lot in, in my first book as well. I think I, I, I reach for the magical because it allows me to put pressure on questions or things that I'm thinking about in the text more effectively. I mean, you can imagine a story that's about, you know, mourning and loss. You can, you can imagine like, you know, the main character's mother passes and, and maybe, maybe he gets a fish. And, and so we can have a realist story where he kind of cathects with the fish over a long period of time and the fish comes to symbolize some, some element of, of, of his past that he can preserve. But that would take a long time. Right. And, and we can, we can see that being a kind of quieter story then, then we could make, if we were able to reach for magic and, and play with the surreal, in which case we could just have the fish speak with the voice of his mother.
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Right.
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Like, we can, we can make things very weird very quickly for, for kind of narrative reasons that allow us to be more intense with the, the story that we're putting together. And I think especially with Babylon, South Dakota, there is a sense in which, I think for me, magic has to be grounded for it not to be fantasy. Right. Like, I think the etymology of, of surreal is a real guiding star. For me, sir, as, as in beyond and real, of course, being real, it is something which, which begins here, right on, you know, on this world where we walk around with both our feet on the ground, but it goes beyond it. But, but importantly, I think it begins here. And so I think the surreal and the magical, for me, they have to be referential and kind of deferential to. To actual reality. They have to be structured out of things that we recognize and are familiar with, but. But perhaps they're organized in more. More esoteric ways. And I think that is what I reach for when I. When I want to make something more intense than. Than reality will allow and allows me to pack in a lot of kind of movement within a very small space. And I think, crucially, it's also fun. I mean, I think I've always really enjoyed science fiction and fantasy and those genres, and I think being able to import those elements into my own fiction has been very satisfying to me as a writer.
- [23:59]
C
And the other interesting part of this is that the big change is driven by the US Government, which tries to build a missile silo and perhaps more kind of on the farm. And the book kind of portrays this. The government, you know, as this big unknowable entity. The weirdest people are there, like, Like. Like the strangest people are there. They do weird things. It's their construction on the site that then starts to spark even more weirdness on the farm. And so how do you think, you know, that particular idea connects to how people, you know, immigrants or otherwise, kind of see the US Government in the broader, like, military, national security apparatus again, as this, like, weird, unknowable, extremely powerful force.
- [24:48]
A
Yeah. I mean, especially, like, coming off, you know, coming off and talking about magic.
- [24:51]
C
Right.
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A
Like, there's nothing less magical than the US Government. But I think a lot of it is like this. This. This idea that the government is. Is this entity which. Which you can't really interact with, which kind of just tells you what to do. I think is emblematic a lot of the experiences of immigrants, you know, such as my parents who would come here and kind of. I remember my parents just being, like, drowning in paperwork. And I remember as soon as my. My English was better than theirs, which was. Which was quite early because I was a kid and I was learning English, you know, as an L1, as soon as I was able to, I was. I was present to service, to translate documents and to kind of like explain letters that they had received in the mail. And I think that has always stuck with me as. As the kind of the most foundational way of interacting with a sovereign power, which is. Which is essentially by. By reading decrees and then having. And then feeling your life change under your feet without really having a sense of, like, you know, can I Can I take this up with someone? Can I, can I ask a question? Everything feels incredibly high stakes and at the same time very remote. And I think it's an expression of that, of that kind of distant locus of power which, which I think is so interesting in this, in, in. In the kind of nuclear age where the decisions of very few people whom we will probably, you know, in all likelihood never meet, never, never shake their hand, never, never look them in the eyes, are responsible not only for our, our safety, but also are the ones who, who've made our total annihilation for the first time possible. And, and I encountered this kind of firsthand when I did my fieldwork research for my PhD. I would go to these silos in South Dakota. I actually interviewed people who had land that the US Government had built silos on. And I had all these, I had these questions that were like, I think, you know, now in retrospect, quite leading, where I would say, like, isn't it, isn't it so crazy to live next to this thing? Or like, like doesn't. Don't you feel scared about, you know, being right next to where exactly a nuclear missile will fall if we ever go to war? And overwhelmingly, the responses that I heard were, were responsive of kind of quotidian blandness where they would say, well, you know, like, like maybe for the first six weeks, and then you get used to it. And now, you know, now for us, the silo is where the fence, where it used to be is just where we, where we start to turn our tractors so that we don't run into the fence. And, and I think what astonished me was this was. It was something that I had thought of as being so totally overwhelming for, you know, for, for the possibility of thinking, right, like, how can you live a normal life on, on and live in a house and know that a mile down the road is, is a megaton warhead? And the answer is the same way that we can get used to anything, which I found to be quite moving, especially, you know, considering, like, the way we all got used to Covid. Like, we all, we. We can be accustomed to so much, and whether or not we have control over that I think ends up being not as big a deal as I think I originally had guessed. And I think I was impressed and very moved by speaking to these people and kind of realizing that the thing that mattered to them was that they were left alone and that they were able to build lives and kind of lives and community and, and, and, and to love each other and, and to be left alone by the government. And that was their greatest wish. And I think another thing that, that really stunned me was that like, well, obviously no one can be left alone by the government. Like, there is no place on earth which is untouched by sovereignty. And, and even, even, even the person who exits all governments, you know, and, and lives in exile still becomes like their identity is defined by, by that fact that they are not under a government, that they are in exile. And, and I think packaging all of that into this book right, is, is how you get this kind of character of the government that is this remote, distant power that, that pulls strings, but no one really understands the whole thing. And moreover, that like, even understanding the whole thing wouldn't bring any closure. It doesn't, you know, at one point in the book, the characters end up, they learn a significant amount about what the government has been researching and it doesn't make their lives any better. Right. And they have to just kind of keep on living. And I think that was the feeling that I wanted to reproduce and explore.
- [29:18]
C
And I do want to, I want to touch on that a bit more because, you know, the book does go down some kind of more philosophical paths. You start getting to kind of near the end of the book, you know, thoughts about death, thoughts about aging, thoughts about kind of family and all this stuff. And you know, I wouldn't want you to kind of spoil too much about kind of some of these philosophical questions the books dives into. But kind of what, what was kind of going through your mind as you were kind of then going through this like, final phase of the book as some of these threads start to come together?
- [29:50]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I, I have this kind of joking line which I've said, I've said now for many years, but I think I'm now reaching the age where like, it, it begins to seem real. And I have to say it less. Which is, which is where I begin a sentence by saying, now in the twilight of my youth, but, but now in the twilight of my youth, I think I've begun to think a lot about mortality and, and, and kind of like the, the long arc of, of, of what we do for each other while we're here. And I think one of the things that, that I've always been interested in is I don't, this is not a spoiler or it's, it, it, it, it's not a useful spoiler. I don't think it'll, it'll make anyone understand something. Early on there one of the, animating principles of this book is this kind of philosophical thought experiment. That comes out of quantum physics called quantum immortality, which is this. It. It falls out of the math. It's an interpretation of the systems of equations of quantum physics. I don't pretend to be a physicist. I don't even. I don't pretend to be even kind of like in the same zip code as a physicist. But I have an interest in it. And I have physicist friends and. And who are very patient with me. And who have answered my questions kind of very slowly and repeatedly. And essentially it falls out of the math. So if you look at the equations, there's an interpretation of it. Where everything that is possible kind of coexists. And then as soon as we measure it or we interact with it. All those possibilities collapse into a single one. And then that's the world. But there's an equally kind of legitimate interpretation of those systems. Which says that every time something could happen, it actually does, just not here. That there is a kind of parallel universe. Or another unreachable, uncontactable world. In which the stuff that didn't happen here does happen. And so, you know, for instance, the going example is like there's a. There's infinite universes out there where the Knicks did not win the NBA Finals. I'm very lucky to be in the universe where they did. One of the infinite universes where they did. But there is this sense of. Of, you know, the.
- [31:53]
C
The.
- [31:54]
A
The possibilities are endless. And not only are they possibilities, but that they are realized elsewhere. And so one of the things that they can build out of this is this thought experiment where you essentially, like, you flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, you kill yourself. If it comes up tails, you flip it again. And if. If there is such a thing as multiple universes. And if there is such a thing as, you know, this interpretation of all possibilities happening infinitely in all other worlds, then you kind of get this really bizarre conclusion, which is that, well, of course you would never experience a universe in which you died, right? In which the coin came up heads and you killed yourself. And so you must always live right. Every fatal event that ever occurs to you. Because. Because definitionally, it would. It would terminate your subjective experience. That surely must mean that in all other universes where the possibilities are endless. It surely must mean that you continue to exist in some other universe. And so the kind of premise that falls out of this is quantum immortality. That actually, due to the laws of physics, we will never experience our own deaths. And the kind of spooky thing, I think for me is like, well, that seems patently absurd, but it's also not something that is easy to refute. And if you think about it, I think it becomes, for me at least, quite horrifying. Right. It's this kind of eternal loneliness that will set in where you'll never experience your own death, but you will experience essentially everybody else's death. And to think about what we want when we. When we say we'd like to live forever, right? Like. Like what is expressed in that dream, I think ultimately at the end of the book, and this is not a spoiler, I think it's up to the reader to decide where we can kind of choose between different competing epistemologies about what happens to us after we die. And, and we can. We can choose the one that we want to choose, but we can only believe the one that. That we can bring ourselves to believe. And those two options are not always, not necessarily coincident. And. And you. And we have characters that. That hope to believe one thing but. But can't help but believe another. And I think it. It helps at least for me to draw the attention away from this question of dying into more a question of living right. If we're not sure what happens to us after we die and we can't really know, what does that mean for how. How we ought to live while we're here and while we're around. And what do we owe one another in that regard?
- [34:25]
C
To kind of close things off. I kind of wanted to, you know, as I was reading your book, I kind of. My mind went to a couple of places, and first of all, it kind of went to, I mean, this very kind of American style of. I don't want to say horror, but, like, these are things like Twin Peaks, which I fully admit I have not watched, and Alan Wake, the video game that is basically just Twin Peaks, but a video game which I have played, but it's kind of like, basically it's set again kind of in the American broad West, not the cowboy west, but the West. And it's about locations that are just weird and weird things happen in them in ways that are somewhat unknowable. Again, so like twin pieces like that Alan Wick, the video games, like that. The other thing this reminds me of is, and I'm going to reveal, like, how, you know, my knowledge of strange, like, 2000s Internet meme culture is this whole SCP foundation thing, which I don't know if you've heard of. Yeah, I mean, okay, this is basically just an scp. Like, the thing that government has is this and this. And so, but there's this whole community of people online that like, write stories about weird artifacts with supernatural powers and then government conspiracies to research them and keep them quiet. And so I guess it's like, it's like, like, like just kind of, you know, talking about like, the broader culture about kind of again, the way people think about like, supernatural and surreal stuff kind of on like the American west, but also this whole like again, like government conspiracies, governments researching the supernatural and just kind of how these things link together.
- [35:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I think it's, it's, it's, it's also. It's great that you mentioned scp because there's like, we can, we can, we can get there even from Twin Peaks, like if you go Twin Peaks to Alan Wake and then Alan Wake to Control, the other video game which I think is set in the world, right? And the control is based on essentially SCPs. And so SCP, you know, for those of us playing along at home who, who are less on the Internet, SCP is this kind of community collaborative fiction project which is essentially like a Wikipedia, but, but about strange entities that are kind of spooky and, and that the government is kind of trying to control. I think it is, it. It is very American to, to believe that the government is up to something. And, and I think it, it, it really, like, I, I mean, there's a historical kind of moment where it really takes off. Like, like one of the things that I think is always fun to point out is like, it's it. Isn't it funny how UFOs only seem to land in, in the US and Russia and other Western countries, but no one else really like, has a, has a UFO experience in the same numbers that we do? Like, isn't it odd that a lot of UFO sightings seem to take place in the vicinity of U.S. air Force test bases? But I think, like, it is, it is, I think in a, in a real way, like this kind of foundational contradiction that I think is particularly American where we think of our government as being both enormously competent and also at the same time like blithering idiots, right? Where, where they are, they're not only capable of, of like huge secret projects, right? And, and I think like, you know, the landmark for that one is of course, the Manhattan Project. Like, like where it seems, if you look at history, it seems that the government has a capacity to marshal huge numbers of labor and, and money into making something and have it be totally secret. And at the same time it's like, well, like the government wouldn't be able to like, like pour water out of a boot if the instructions are written on the heel. Like, there is this sense of, of being controlled by an ultimate power that is also in a kind of very real way, like, competent. And I think that is the articulation of, of this kind of frontier mentality, right? Of like out here we are abandoned by, by, by law and justice, like, which we must take into our own hands, which I think is a very peculiarly American way of going about it. And I think to see that in the fiction is, is just to instantiate those fantasies, right? Like that, that the government is competent and it is hiding things from us. And, and that once, once the truth is out, like, the world will be clearer. And I think in a lot of these, like, like, you know, in, in. In Alan Wake, which, which I actually started playing and then I had to stop because it was too scary, or, or Control, right, Which I did play all the way through, or scp, which. Which I also. I get a lot of like, SCP inspired fiction in, in my workshops for my students. And it's always a delight to read. It is. It is a sense of like, kind of building out a world in which like, it is. It's our world, right? Like, like the thing about these fantasies is, like, is that there are places or there's sites in, in this world which, which are where the veil is thin between this world and where, like where different things can happen. But I think crucially, like going back to what we were talking about with magic, like there are. These are places that we could go to, right, that we could experience ourselves.
- [39:18]
C
That it isn't.
- [39:19]
A
We aren't like imagining a fantastical world which is apart from our own, but we're actually imagining fantastical sites in our own world that we could one day visit. And I think that distinction is what has really drawn me to this kind of mode of, you know, like conspiratorial fiction, I guess, because it, it. It's this suggestion that like, well, you're just not in, in the coolest place, right? Like, like you could. You could just get in your car and drive to Twin Peaks, right? Like you could, you could just drive to these places and you could experience those things and also you can leave. And so they become places where you can interact with power and, and, and conspiracy and also places that you can exit. And I think the, the fun thing for the character, you know, fun is a, is a, is a stretch here perhaps. But, but the, the interesting thing for the characters in Babylon, South Dakota is that they can't leave. And even, even though, you know, sometimes they seem, they seem to try, it never seems to actually really occur to them that, that the, the entire world is not like their farm. And I think that realization takes a long time to kind of build and calcify and, and, and to kind of be able to follow the characters through that process, I think is one of the great experiences of being able to write fiction that spans generations is you get to plant stories and watch them become legends.
- [40:39]
C
So I think with that, that's a great place to end our conversation with Tom Lynn, author of the novel Babylon, South Dakota. Tom, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work and what's next? What do you think the next project will be?
- [40:55]
A
Yeah, you can find my work anywhere books are sold. If you listen to audiobooks, you can listen to them anywhere audiobooks are sold. You can even listen to them on Spotify, which is a new thing that I think is, I don't know, Spotify doesn't have a great track record of being kind to the people who produce content, but you can listen to it on Spotify as well and you can get it at your local library. And librarians are the coolest people in the world and the library is the most magical space we've ever devised. What's next? I'm working on a third novel. It is, I think it's going to be like a detective or a mystery story. I think it's going to be set on, on the high seas. I think it's going to involve fishing and taxidermy and transgenic mice and, and, and questions of deep time. You know, same things that have been haunting me since the start. And you should look for that whenever I have a deadline.
- [41:53]
C
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N you go to asianreviewbooks.com find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter @BookReviews Asia. That's reviews plural. And you can find many more often views at the new bookstorework.com we're on off air Podcast apps Apple Podcasts Spotify Rate us recommend us share with your friends Supporting those running in around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more news coming up on the show. But before then. Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [42:25]
A
Thank you so much for having me. It's always good to be back.