Episode 8: Horrible Little Guys, with Isabel J. Kim and Amanda Silberling

[upbeat music] Welcome back to Dreaming Against the Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker, and this week's episode is a little bit different. It's, uh, kind of an experiment. We're doing a crossover episode with our fellow Multitude show, Wow, If True, which is hosted by Isabel Kim and Amanda Silberling. So they're our guests this week, and it's gonna be our first time having a show where we've got more than one guest on at once. And to explain why I brought them on, I need to tell you a little bit more about how I first heard about Isabel's work in particular. As listeners of the show know, I'm a huge fan of Ursula K. Le Guin's work, and one of her most famous short stories, maybe her most famous short story, is called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. And if you haven't read that short story, you should really go read it right now and then come back and listen to this podcast. But I love that story, and so a couple years ago, when I found out that there was a short story that was sort of a riff on that or a response to it that was making the rounds on the internet, I immediately went and checked it out, and it's called Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole? [laughs] And it's written by Isabel. And despite that crazy-sounding title, it's really an excellent short story, and in fact, won several major awards. And today, in fact, the day that this episode launches, Isabel's first novel, Sublimation, is coming out, and I've already read it, and I can tell you it's excellent. And so I'm a big fan of Isabel's writing. Amanda is also an excellent writer. She's a tech journalist. And the two of them have this podcast, Wow, If True, about various extremely online stuff, and I am also terminally online. And so we brought them on to see how it would go, and it was a lot of fun. And I hope you enjoy finding out just how terminally online all three of us are, and we'll return to the usual format next week. [upbeat music] Amanda, Isabel, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine.

Hello. We're excited to, uh, dream. Do we have to, like, go into a... Is this, like, a sleep podcast? Are we gonna... [laughs] I don't know what I'm s- I, I don't know what I'm saying. I haven't talked to people all day.

[laughs] Oh my God.

Is this the first conversation you're having all day? [laughs]

Yeah. I got in an argument on Discord, but that wasn't verbal. [laughs]

Amanda, you're a journalist. You should be better at this. [laughs] I will let you take the lead.

No, that's not how journalism works-

[laughs] Okay

... speaking as a journalist. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are the most internet-brained people possible, uh, and clearly the internet is doing wonderful things to us. Um-

I feel like on any given day, I either talk to, like, 12 people or I talk to no one. [laughs]

Yeah. But yeah, welcome, welcome to the show. [laughs]

Um, hi. I'm Isabel. I write science fiction novels and also a bunch of other s- um, short fiction and stuff, and me and Amanda have a podcast together called Wow, If True, where honestly, the intersection between Dreaming Against the Machine and Wow, If True, is truly just horrible little men. Horrible little men-

Yes

... rationalists, [laughs]