Annalee Newitz Quotes & Sayings

When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters. — Annalee Newitz

Think we're still stuck in that agricultural mindset, where we imagine that we can shape the Earth. Sure, we can do that. But the Earth has the power to shape us much more powerfully. To survive climate change, we'll have to realize how dependent we are on our ecosystems for our own survival. — Annalee Newitz

We are headed to a radically new Earth, at least from our perspective. But from the planet's perspective, this is nothing new. As the geologist Peter Ward is fond of pointing out, we are actually heading back to a time kind of like the Miocene. The Miocene ended about 5.5 million years ago, and it was the last time that the planet had no icecaps. — Annalee Newitz

What can we expect from this latest crop of indie directors who have been sucked into the franchise factory? I'm especially curious about 'Star Wars,' which will feature an all-indie crew after J. J. Abrams finishes with 'Episode VII.' — Annalee Newitz

Survivor species tend to have huge populations, so they can afford to lose many individuals and still survive as a species. They also tend to be small. If you're small, you need less food - which is great in a situation where famine is everywhere. — Annalee Newitz

I founded io9 back in 2008, and I watched it journey from the farthest reaches of space to its current home under this atmosphere bubble on Ceres. — Annalee Newitz

At last we've seen the first installment of Joss Whedon's new web series, 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog,' and it's sweeter than we'd ever imagined. — Annalee Newitz

Economic systems rise and fall just like empires. That's the kind of perspective we need to take if we hope to prosper for centuries rather than for the next quarter. — Annalee Newitz

I think small animals can escape from many kinds of natural disaster more easily. There are just more places for them to hide, and more ways for them to find safe habitats. So this means that rats are set up to rule the Earth, but most of us already knew that. Now you know why. — Annalee Newitz

With technology tracking us everywhere we go, 'cosplay' might become our best defense against surveillance. — Annalee Newitz

There is evidence that we are headed into what would be the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's hard to know for sure if you're in one because a mass extinction is an event where over 75 percent of the species on the planet die out over a - usually about a million-year period. The fastest it might happen is in hundreds of thousands of years. — Annalee Newitz

If you love epic space opera, you shouldn't miss 'Interstellar'. — Annalee Newitz

Sometimes it's hard to take everyday concerns seriously when you think about vanished ecosystems that existed 300 million years ago and were eradicated by giant explosions. My goals haven't changed, because my goal has always been to save the world! — Annalee Newitz

I think a lot of us responded intensely to 'True Detective' because it was so incredibly earnest. That's what made it heartbreaking and involving. — Annalee Newitz

Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's through the back door. — Annalee Newitz

It is true that I will confess that I have an incredible fascination for pop-culture stories about the Apocalypse and the end of the world. — Annalee Newitz

In the 1920s and 30s, when Radio Shack was young, a much earlier generation of nerds swarmed into these tiny shops to talk excitedly about building radios and other transmission devices. You might say that Radio Shack helped define gadget culture for four generations, from radio whizzes up to smartphone dorks. — Annalee Newitz

When you consider that our technology has advanced from the first telephones to smart phones in roughly a century, it's easy to understand why it seems like tomorrow is arriving faster than it ever did. — Annalee Newitz

The fact that we have been able to perturb the carbon cycle with our industrial revolution is evidence of how vulnerable we are - because when we destroy our environments, we destroy our food and energy supplies. In short, we destroy ourselves. — Annalee Newitz

I am a big proponent of character arcs that show us how people change over time. — Annalee Newitz

Capitalism is, fundamentally, an economic system that promotes inequality. — Annalee Newitz

You've probably heard the stories about how io9 got its name. And maybe you know that io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders and I were inspired by Kathy Keeton, whose groundbreaking magazine 'Omni' combined coverage of real science with science fiction. But what you probably don't know is how unlikely it was that io9 ever succeeded at all. — Annalee Newitz

Your fragile mind can't have forgotten the terrifying technothriller series known 'Scorpion'. Because it features the worst hacking scenes ever broadcast in any medium. — Annalee Newitz

Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers. — Annalee Newitz

I think in the long run, it will be better for us if we solve our problems without suffering through some terrible disaster. I like the idea of change without Apocalypse. — Annalee Newitz

Radio Shack is meeting the fate of many other stores that were wildly popular in the twentieth century, including record stores, comic book stores, bookstores and video stores. — Annalee Newitz

When I was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I became obsessed with end user license agreements. — Annalee Newitz

'The Red' delivers intense action, leavened by a genuinely sympathetic portrait of soldiers caught up in battles they never chose. — Annalee Newitz

'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest. — Annalee Newitz

I don't know if most people have truly taken on board what this says about our place in the natural world. It doesn't mean that humans are dominating the Earth, ruling over all of nature. In fact, it is a reminder that we are only a tiny part of nature, at the mercy of a system whose operations predate us by billions of years, and will continue billions of years after we're gone. — Annalee Newitz

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation. — Annalee Newitz

The early Triassic was a period when the planet was recovering from the worst mass extinction it had ever known - that was the end Permian extinction, where climate change caused in part by mega-volcanic eruptions wiped out ninety-five percent of life on Earth. It took about ten or twenty million years for the planet's ecosystems to stabilize. During that time you saw a lot of weird, out-of-balance ecosystems where, for example, crocodile-like predators ripped the crap out of each other along the coasts. — Annalee Newitz

Michel Gondry's 'Green Hornet' was another franchise flick that felt like it came out of left field - I thought in a good way, but most audiences disagreed. — Annalee Newitz

'Interstellar' is a thematic sequel to Christopher Nolan's last original film, 'Inception'. It drops us into a dark future full of otherworldly landscapes and time distortions. — Annalee Newitz

Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe. — Annalee Newitz

If we lose bees, we may be looking at losing apples and oranges. We may be looking at losing a great deal of other crops, as well, and other animals that depend on those crops. — Annalee Newitz

Whether 'Avatar' is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick 'District 9', released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. — Annalee Newitz

Fifty years ago, historians advised politicians and policy-makers. They helped chart the future of nations by helping leaders learn from past mistakes in history. But then something changed, and we began making decisions based on economic principles rather than historical ones. The results were catastrophic. — Annalee Newitz

Despite the proliferation of personal storytelling in recent years, and the shift in social conditions that has facilitated these stories being told and heard, there are still certain stories that cannot be told - either because we have no language with which to articulate them or because there is no interpretive community to hear and understand them. These stories become, instead, secrets and lies - stories that signal social isolation and disempowerment rather than connection and strength. One such story within contemporary culture, as the epigraphs from Dorothy Allison and Victoria Brownworth suggest, is the story of class - a story that often only becomes tellable as a lie, joke, or dirty secret. This is especially the case with the category of "white trash. — Annalee Newitz

The myth that young people should leave the nest at 18, never to return, started with iconic American Benjamin Franklin. — Annalee Newitz

Critics have called alien epic 'Avatar' a version of 'Dances With Wolves' because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. — Annalee Newitz

When it comes to the population explosion, there are two questions on the table. One, is our population growth going to kill us all? And two, is there any ethical way to prevent that from happening? — Annalee Newitz

Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet. — Annalee Newitz

Using predictive models from engineering and public health, designers will plan safer, healthier cities that could allow us to survive natural disasters, pandemics, and even a radiation calamity that drives us underground. — Annalee Newitz

Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy - witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he'd been faking evidence for years. — Annalee Newitz

Io9 was the last standalone site that Gawker Media ever launched. It was born at a time when many of the company's other famous sites, from Consumerist and Wonkette to Fleshbot and Idolator, were being sold off or shuttered. — Annalee Newitz

We're seeing a new 'Gilded Age,' where inheritance is a deciding factor in who becomes the wealthiest. — Annalee Newitz

As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me:

You get famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people's means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normally used to produce food away to other uses. You also get famine when the price of food is moderate if the incomes of large groups collapse.... In all of this, the lesson is that a properly functioning market does not seek to advance human happiness but rather to advance human wealth. What speaks in the market is money: purchasing power. If you have no money, you have no voice in the market. The market acts as if it does not know you exist and does not care whether you live or die.

DeLong describes a marketplace that leaves people to die - not out of malice , but out of indifference. — Annalee Newitz

Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that. — Annalee Newitz

I try to be realistic and pragmatic. I have a lot of hope for humanity as a species, but obviously as individuals we can be extremely flawed. We may have to go through some very terrible times in the near future, even if we ultimately survive as Homo sapiens. — Annalee Newitz

Humans have obviously contributed a great deal of carbon to the atmosphere. So we are warming the planet up. — Annalee Newitz

With enough money and international coordination, we can push incoming asteroids out of Earth's path. We might even be able to bring back extinct animals in the lab. The problem really isn't scientific - it's cultural. We aren't yet able to coordinate ourselves as a global civilization to do something simple like bring food to a famine-stricken region. We can actually use current satellite technologies to predict where famine will strike next, but we can't get food there - usually for political reasons. — Annalee Newitz

Evolution, climate change, and the construction of the physical universe down to its atoms are processes that we measure in millions or billions of years. — Annalee Newitz

'World War Z' is basically a big-budget B-movie. — Annalee Newitz

Amphibians are dying out like crazy, and frogs and salamanders may be largely extinct by the end of the twenty-first century. Imagine an animal that begins its life in the water, but ends it on land - already, that's pretty weird. But, also, a lot of them are incredibly tiny and look wildly improbable. They have funny little toes, they stretch their throats into weird bubble shapes when they croak, and some of them are poisonous to the touch. I think kids from the twenty-second century might mythologize amphibians the way kids today mythologize dinosaurs. — Annalee Newitz

To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media. — Annalee Newitz

In fact, the early demographer Thomas Malthus believes that the only way the human population would ever check itself was by running headlong into a disaster, like a pandemic or famine. Sometimes we get so frustrated with the slowness of human political processes that we wish a giant flaming rock would solve the problem for us. — Annalee Newitz

Back in the 1980s, you could learn how to add memory cards to your PC in a Radio Shack. — Annalee Newitz

The U.N.'s current projection is that humanity will number 9.3 billion individuals in 2050 and then hit 10.1 billion by 2100. Meanwhile, our energy resources are dwindling, and droughts threaten our food supplies. — Annalee Newitz

Imagining the world without us is a recipe for despair and paralysis. I actually think it's more helpful to imagine the world before us, to look back at those unstable ecosystems of the Triassic and realize that were in another phase of unstable ecosystems. Knowing that, demystifying our situation as it were, makes it easier to think about solutions. We are not looking into the unknown. The only thing unknown about the situation is how we're going to fix it, and when. — Annalee Newitz

Watching 'Interstellar' is really like watching two movies slowly collide with each other. — Annalee Newitz

Humans are a great survivor species but our survival will be pretty grim if all of the plants and animals we depend on die out. That's why any human survival strategy has to include a plan to maintain our environment roughly in the state that it's in now. — Annalee Newitz

Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations - perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization. — Annalee Newitz

You are ruled by change whether you like it or not, and io9's future path lies with joining a larger site that covers technology as well as science and science fiction. — Annalee Newitz

In terms of fiction, there are a number of writers who are thinking about the future of the environment whose work complements mine. Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 is a great example, as is Tobias Buckell's novel Arctic Rising. — Annalee Newitz

I believe that it's fine if [the] university wants to regulate, for example, bandwidth access, but they should treat the students data as private data. — Annalee Newitz

I disagree that we need to contemplate eliminating ourselves in order to move forward. Sure, I think a good dystopian story can serve to steer us on the right path toward a better world. But we also need stories that offer solutions to our problems that are realistic, and workable today. — Annalee Newitz

Turning a zombie pandemic into a generic disaster movie robs the zombies of their dirty, nasty edginess and robs the disaster of its epic scope. — Annalee Newitz

Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time. — Annalee Newitz

To understand the future properly, it's crucial that we listen to geologists as often as we do computer scientists. — Annalee Newitz

If outsider perspectives made 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Dark Knight' into fantastic franchises, imagine what would happen if you brought in the perspectives of women and people of color. — Annalee Newitz

Put simply, 'Interstellar' has a strong undercurrent of cheesiness. — Annalee Newitz

When I was a journalist at Wired, I convinced a doctor to implant an RFID tracking device in my arm. — Annalee Newitz

Cities might become biological entities, walls hung with curtains of algae that glow at night and sequester carbon, and floors made from tweaked cellular material that strengthens like bones as we walk on it. — Annalee Newitz

As fears about the energy and environmental crises reach a fever pitch, we're all searching for solutions. And one possibility is that we could fix everything if we'd just shrink our population back down to about 2 billion people - which would put us roughly where we were at 80 years ago. — Annalee Newitz

Some time ago we discovered the carbon cycle - a long-term set of chemical reactions that govern climates based on how much carbon is free in the atmosphere. At that point, it became clear that humans were affecting our environments far more profoundly than we realized. By releasing so much carbon and greenhouse gas into the environment, we're making long-term changes to every aspect of the natural world. — Annalee Newitz

There are many compelling reasons why social scientists should turn more attention to the situation of whites in the underclass. Prime among these is that researchers and politicians have constructed a grossly distorted image of poverty in this country. While whites constitute a vast majority of the poor population in the United States, blackness composes the most familiar visage in representations of poverty. — Annalee Newitz

When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born. — Annalee Newitz

Suddenly, all the giant Hollywood franchises are being driven by alternative filmmakers. — Annalee Newitz

It's only been in the past two generations that we truly understood the impact our civilization has had on the natural world. To our credit as a species, we have turned this obscure scientific fact about carbon cycles into one of the most important political issues of the 21st century. — Annalee Newitz

If we return abruptly to a Miocene-like climate, it's reasonable to think that we would experience a lot of extinctions, and maybe even a mass extinction in the long term. Would the life on Earth be radically different? Of course we can't say for sure, but I think a lot of it would look familiar. Like a lot of people, I worry a lot about whether marine mammals would survive, especially whales. Ocean acidification is one of the major killers in climate change events, and that makes the ocean a very inhospitable place. — Annalee Newitz

So science alone cannot solve this problem [mass extinction of humans]. It's something that we can only tackle by bringing science together with culture, economics, and even politics. — Annalee Newitz

Max Brooks' novel 'World War Z' is one of the greatest zombie stories ever written, partly for reasons that make it basically unfilmable. — Annalee Newitz

A group of scientists wanted to find the most effective mosquito repellents. So they tested 10 different substances, including campout standbys like DEET, as well as a random choice: Victoria's Secret perfume Bombshell. Turns out the perfume is almost as good as DEET. — Annalee Newitz

If we look at the past two centuries of economic history in Europe and the United States, we see an astounding pattern. Capital will accumulate in a tiny portion of the population, no matter what we do. — Annalee Newitz

Part of what I wanted to do in my book was point out that we have almost reached the point where we can prevent a mass extinction with the science and technology we have today. We can build carbon neutral cities. — Annalee Newitz

Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before. — Annalee Newitz

I'm going to have to class 'True Detective's first season with so many other shows that were great until the final episode(s) and then lost their way. I still love this show, but I would have preferred no ending at all to this one. — Annalee Newitz

In the 1970s, as historians became enchanted with microhistories, economists were expanding the reach of their discipline. Nations, states and cities began to plan for the future by consulting with economists whose prognostications were shaped by investment cycles rather than historical ones. — Annalee Newitz

Before the 21st century, stories became popular because people talked about them in other publications or shared magazine and newspaper clippings with friends. — Annalee Newitz

I think that humans are also set up to survive. We're not as small as rats, but we make up for that by being intelligent enough to make our own hiding places and to adapt to new habitats, even if they are changing very quickly. We have an enormous population, and can afford to lose billions of people without suffering very much as a species. Indeed, some would say losing five billion people would be good for the planet - I disagree with them, but can't deny that we would do just fine if there were two billion of us or even one billion. — Annalee Newitz

'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. — Annalee Newitz

We can celebrate how far we've come from our sexist past when women and men are equally represented in the pages of science fiction anthologies. — Annalee Newitz

The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film. — Annalee Newitz

A hundred years ago, this City[...]'s energy production, its food and fuel, came from all over the world, often traveling thousands of miles. People used energy just to ship more energy to the places that needed it. When you're high on fossil fuel fumes, I guess almost anything can make sense. — Annalee Newitz

In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out. — Annalee Newitz

There can be problems with extended families, and it can get a little close for comfort. But for the younger generations, it's clear that this option is becoming almost as appealing as living alone. — Annalee Newitz

Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down. — Annalee Newitz

RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet. — Annalee Newitz

A series of studies in the 1990s and 2000s revealed that as women gained more access to education, jobs, and birth control, they had fewer children. As a result, developed countries in western Europe, Japan, and the Americas were seeing zero or negative population growth. — Annalee Newitz