Before we get into today’s interview, I wanted to announce a new Tube Talk feature I’m calling “WTF Is This a Patent For?!” Each week, I’ll share a weird image from an actual U.S. patent. Think you know what it is or have a good wrong guess? Submit your answer using the button below the patent image found in the interview below. (And don’t look it up! What’s the fun in that?) I’ll share who got it right and who gave the best wrong answer the following week.

And now, on to our regularly scheduled post.

Are you interested in Pompeii? Slime molds? Great sci-fi stories? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then Annalee Newitz’s new novel, A Wall Is Also a Road¹, is perfect for you. Newitz is a science journalist who also writes science fiction. They’ve published fiction and nonfiction books, including Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, which explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, including Pompeii, and Automatic Noodle, a novella (with pneumatic tube content) where a crew of robots start a noodle shop in a future San Francisco recovering from a devastating war.

A Wall Is Also a Road stemmed from their research for Four Lost Cities, where they came across a piece of graffiti that a woman named Murtis drew on a wall in Pompeii. What Murtis wrote is NSFW, but she clearly had a sense of humor and is someone I’d love to spend a night out with. Newitz felt the same, and Murtis became a major character in her latest novel, along with an extraterrestrial slime mold who comes to Pompeii to study Earth’s ecosystems.

Newitz was kind enough to talk with me about their latest book, and also shared what other projects are on their plate in the near future. (Spoiler: one of them includes more pneumatic tube content!)

Read on for our discussion.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

I'd have to say it was Pompeii, because after I finished working on Four Lost Cities, I could not stop thinking about Pompeii, specifically the people who I had written about who we don't really know much about. So I talk about the graffiti by Murtis in Four Lost Cities, and I have a section where I talk about how awesome that is, but I couldn't just invent stuff about her for that book.

Murtis was the precipitating interest in the story. I kept thinking about her. I kept thinking about Julia, which is the name of the person who owned this major insula and was renting out rooms at the time that the city was buried. Also, Eumachia, who was a really wealthy woman in Pompeii, and I just kept thinking there were all these badass women. I wanted to get to know them, and then it pretty quickly occurred to me that an alien perspective would be really interesting because the experience of studying ancient Roman culture often creates a sense of being an alien. I always think it's a mistake when people are like, “Romans! They were just like us!” They were in many weird ways like us, but also not. So I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna have an alien come to ancient Rome, and that’ll just be double aliens, in a sense. And then I’m just obsessed with slime molds, so I was like, of course it’ll be a slime mold.

It really started with me thinking about what the slime mold facial expressions would be because, of course, they’re a single celled organisms. They don’t really have faces, but they do have the ability, like snails, to send eyes out to the end of arms or stalks on their heads. So for them, their eyes are kind of part of their arms, and so I kept thinking, “Well, what would it look like to them if they encountered someone who couldn't send their eyes out of their head, like how weird that would look to them?”

Where humans close their eyes, for these slime molds, that is like withdrawing your eye back into your body. That’s what it looks like to them. So I started from the slime mold perspective, and I did develop a whole bunch of ways that they use their bodies to express feelings, like they elongate when they’re laughing, and they send out spikes when they’re mad, and they get kind of pimply when they’re nervous or anxious, and there’s a whole bunch of other ones, too.

It was definitely later, much later in the process. The original title for the book was Graduate Student from Beyond the Galaxy, which nobody liked except for me. I was like, “It’s funny! My editor was like, “Yeah, that’s a no.” The actual title came to me when I was talking to one of the archeologists who I interviewed for Four Lost Cities, and then again when I was working on this book, Eric Poehler, and he spent a long time studying Pompeii, and he writes about the roads and what we can learn from the roads in Pompeii.

I wanted my characters to be walking through Pompeii in a realistic way, and in one scene they’re outside the wall, and I asked Eric what they would see. And he was like, “Well, of course, a road would be going all the way around the wall of the city.” And for whatever reason, that really sent me on a galaxy brain spiral where I was like, why is it this is a recurring theme in human architecture, that we build these walls and then we build roads along them?

Walls and roads are architectural adversaries. A road is supposed to take you into a place, and a wall is supposed to keep you out of a place. And it’s super weird that we are always building them next to each other, and so I started thinking about what would it be like if you lived in a civilization where there was no contradiction between wall and road, and that was when I came up with the architecture for Gardenpath’s people.

Because they’re slime molds, they can scrunch up a wall and bloop around anywhere they want. So for them, they have roads and streets. They also have walls, and they spend a lot of time on the walls: they plant gardens on the walls, they have paths on the walls. They tend to enter buildings through windows, and so if you're going up to the fourth floor, you'd just squinch up the wall and then bloop through the window and splat on the floor inside.

For us, saying a wall is also a road is a very profound statement. But for these slime molds, it’s just a fact of life. It has a different resonance, and to me, as a writer, I think it’s really fun to think about how two different civilizations would think about the same metaphor.

I think a lot of writers would rightfully see the eruption of the volcano as the climactic moment of the book, right? Because it’s a pretty climactic thing, but I didn’t really want to write about that partly because I had done so much reading and investigating what actually happened in Pompeii after the volcano erupted, which is that the majority of people did manage to evacuate. It was a pretty slow burn, as it were — not to minimize the fact that over 1,000 people were killed, but I knew that it wasn't as bad of a disaster as we often imagine it was.

But also, I thought of the volcano as something that would help the plot make sense. Gardenpath comes to Earth to study ecosystems, and so when they get there, they don’t know anything about humans. In fact, they’re not there to study humans at all — they’re there to study how an ecosystem evolves on a planet. And when they figure out they’re on top of a volcano, which is something they’ve seen on other planets, they’re like, “Oh, I recognize this. I understand how a volcano can enrich the soil and how that can create a nice place for life to evolve.” And this gives me a good reason why they would land there and then say, “Yeah, this is going to be my fieldwork site.” And then later, of course, because they have very advanced technology, they’re like, “Oh shit, this is going to erupt!”

I don't want to get into spoilers, but the threat of the volcano becomes a test of Gardenpath and Murtis’s relationship and how much they trust each other. And that was really what I was interested in: what it means to tell someone, “Hey, my science is telling me that this crazy thing is going to happen. Do you believe me? Do you put faith in that?”

It becomes almost a way of thinking about how people are dealing with climate science right now; do you trust people who say, “Listen, I know that in 100 years, things are going to be really different. We’re going to need to start changing how we live now.” So it allowed me to ask those kinds of questions: the personal questions of how you trust someone, but also those bigger questions of do we trust science? And, of course, it’s always fun to set off a volcano. In fact, in my previous novel, The Terraformers, I also set off a volcano. I think I’m just into volcanoes.

No, I don’t think there's any volcanoes in my next nonfiction book, sadly.

No, there are no slime molds. My next book is also an archeology book, and it does involve earthquakes because I’m going to be writing about Minoan culture, and Crete had lots of earthquakes, but not volcanoes. Well, I guess there was one volcano off the coast, but there will probably be other volcanoes in my life.

There are no pneumatic tubes in A Wall Is Also a Road, but I am working on the sequel to Automatic Noodle, and that is going to have a lot of pneumatic tubes. In fact, I am literally about to write a scene with pneumatic tubes after we get off this call.