Chris Yip 0:01 Welcome to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. Each month I sit down with someone from our vibrant global community to talk about what places them at the heart of designing bold solutions for a better world. You'll meet students, professors and alumni who are making a difference across a range of fields, and then some who you may not expect to find. My guest today is Aerospace Engineer and award-winning Science-Fiction Writer Eric Choi. Eric is a graduate of both our engineering science program and the University of Toronto Institute of Aerospace Studies. He uses his expertise to advance space technology such as the Canadarm2 but also to tell compelling stories about alternative histories and potential futures. His first published collection of short stories is called Just Like Being There. Eric, welcome to the podcast. Eric Choi 0:59 Thank you, Chris. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Chris Yip 1:02 Really, I'm super looking forward to our conversation. As we were planning this I was thinking back to some of the sci-fi stuff that I grew up reading. I started thinking back to the Ringworld and Larry Niven and Keith Laumer and those sorts of books, and I realized I was thinking, Eric's science fiction is a little more topical, a little more timely, more recent. I always start with the same kind of questions. Tell me how and where you grew up, and when did you realize when engineering was for you? Eric Choi 1:32 Well, I was born in Hong Kong, and our family came to Canada when I was about three and I grew up in Brampton, Ontario. My parents worked at Pearson Airport so because of what they do, I was always very interested in things that go into the sky. So I suppose that space is a bit of a logical extension of that. In terms of what got me into engineering, by the time I hit high school and started thinking about university, I had a choice, was I going to go into more of the scientific aspects of space or the engineering aspects of space? And what swayed me into engineering was an article that I read in National Geographic, about the Voyager mission to the outer solar system. And really the miracles that were performed by the operations engineers that enabled the spacecraft to continue their mission far out, beyond Jupiter, beyond Saturn, into the outer solar system, and now into interstellar space. So these Voyager spacecrafts, they were designed and launched in the 1970s and it's perhaps hard to imagine, but they actually used a mechanical tape recorder to store their data. And so when that tape recorder had to be turned on, they would have to fire a thruster in order to basically dump the angular momentum and to keep the spacecraft steady during the very long exposures that were needed to take pictures in the very dark outer solar system and this absolutely amazed me. I was just astounded by the very notion that there are actually people out there whose job it is to do such astounding things to do these amazing engineering accomplishments. So that was what did it for me, and that's what swayed me towards an education, eventually a career in engineering. Chris Yip 3:31 That's a fascinating story. And I think, to an even more impressive fact is that they're still working, right? They're still sending data back this many years later. It's just mind boggling to think that you can still talk to instruments that are that far away from us, right? I sort of alluded to in the beginning, who inspired you in the sci-fi realm? Who were you reading that kind of sparked this interest? Were there some of the classics or was it actually other folks? Eric Choi 4:05 There were a lot of the classics. You mentioned Larry Niven early on in your remarks and novels like the Ringworld series were certainly very formula to me. I was always a very big fan of this sort of technical, big ideas type of science fiction, and certainly people like Larry Niven had a technical or in his case, a mathematical background. Arthur C. Clarke was of course, very influential and formulative to me, again, these big ideas. How would a space elevator work? Or what would a ringworld about a star look like? How would you beat the devil with mathematics? That was a convergent series by Larry Niven, which, by the way, is one of my favorite short stories. I'd like to add as well that Canada has been very strong in developing its own crop of science-fiction writers, many of whom write in this sort of hard or scientifically consistent science fiction that I write myself and enjoy. So there are folks like Robert J. Sawyer, there's Julie Czerneda who's a biologist by background, Peter watts, another biologist, Robert Charles Wilson, Premee Mohamed who's from Edmonton. Her background is in molecular genetics. So very strong science-fiction community right here in Canada as well. Chris Yip 5:27 So let's do a little bit of the educational stuff. So you chose us to study EngSci at U of T and then grad studies in aerospace. What was the real driver there? What do you remember most about U of T Engineering back in the day, which still influences you today? Eric Choi 5:42 When I was in high school, I had a little bit of a mentor who said something that I remember to this day, and this person said that the purpose of university is not to teach you how to do a job, it's to teach you how to figure out how to do a job. So the Engineering Science program has, shall we say, a perhaps well-earned reputation as being somewhat academically challenging and I can certainly say that, that experience has definitely given me the skill set of how to figure out how to do something. I think the other important aspect, in terms of the challenge of the Engineering Science program in particular, is sort of some of the social and interpersonal aspects. So unless you are some kind of a super genius, and I can assure you that I was certainly not, there's really no good way that you can get through a program like that alone. You must collaborate, you must work together with people and this is something that carries through to your careers, where people work in teams to accomplish amazing things like sending spacecraft to the edge of the solar system or putting people on the moon. And indeed, through this shared experiences, there are classmates and friends that I frankly, don't think would have gotten through the program without them and I've been very blessed that indeed, many of these friendships have endured to this very day. Chris Yip 7:21 And I know that there's a story about how your writing career in a sense kind of got a nice launch because of one of your friends during undergrad. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Eric Choi 7:31 Yeah, so this was during my third year in Engineering Science. So by this time, I had streamed into the aerospace option, and I had a good friend and again, one of these people that remains my friends this day. So a person named Rakesh Persaud, he made me aware of a contest that was being put on by the Asimov Science Fiction Magazine. And this was a contest that was specifically targeted towards undergraduate students who had an ambition to write science fiction or fantasy. So I submitted a story and it's really hard for me to describe all these years later, this absolute shock that not only did I place in the contest, but in fact, I won the first year of that contest that it was awarded. And my first story, Dedication, appropriately is the first story in my collection, Just Like Being There. And I'll say as well that, that contest still exists. It's now called the Dell Magazine's Award. So you can go to dellaward.com and I would encourage any young person who has an interest in writing science fiction or fantasy to look into that. It's really launched my career and it's done that for many, many others as well. Chris Yip 8:50 Okay, so your career in aerospace, can you tell us a little bit about some of the projects that you were working on in there? Eric Choi 8:56 Well, it again started at U of T because I was very fortunate that for my undergraduate thesis, I had a chance to work with Professor James Drummond, who was at that time in the atmospheric physics group and the U of T Physics Department and he was the principal investigator of a Canadian atmospheric science instrument called MOPITT. It's one of the nice things about this field is all these cute acronyms but MOPITT stood for measurements of pollution in the troposphere and this was an instrument that flew on a NASA satellite called Terra. And it looked at measuring on a global scale, carbon monoxide concentrations in the troposphere, so in the lower atmosphere where you and I and everybody else are fortunate enough to live. So that was really something very special to be able to have a small part in helping to set up the test facility really, back in the day in the basement of the Burton Tower in the McLennan Physics Lab. In industry since that time, my first job after graduation was actually on the operations team at the Canadian Space Agency for a Canadian satellite called RADARSAT and this was...we're now into the third generation of RADARSATs. Now there's a RADARSAT constellation mission but what is unique, and this is a real testament, again, to Canadian technology is these are satellites that use synthetic aperture radar so they can look through clouds, it doesn't matter if it's night or day to be able to take images of the earth and as you mentioned in your opening remarks, one of the special things that I was very privileged to be a very small part of was the deployment and operation of the Canadarm2. So I was somewhere there in the background when Chris Hadfield was doing his thing deploying the arm back in 2001. And I think one of the highlights of my career, I think professionally was really the great privilege to work on a Canadian instrument, a meteorological package that flew to Mars and landed successfully on Mars, on a NASA mission called Phoenix. And what was special about this particular instrument, it was a lidar instrument so imagine sort of like a laser radar that sent pulses of light up into the Martian atmosphere and based on the return, you could infer properties of the atmosphere and one of the discoveries that this instrument made was to confirm that, in fact, snow falls on Mars. So there's something particularly neat, I think, about a Canadian instrument, confirming that snow falls on another planet. Chris Yip 11:52 That's really cool. And maybe you want to tell our listeners, your interest in being an actual astronaut. Eric Choi 11:58 Right. So between 2008 and 2009 there was another call by the Canadian Space Agency for a new batch of astronaut candidates. And so I threw my hat into the proverbial ring and, obviously, with not a lot of expectations, but to my shock, I went through the process, and mysteriously I kept passing the tests and the next thing I knew I was actually one of the top 40 finalists back in 2009. And I believe there was something like 5351 applicants, so that was a pretty neat thing. I'll say that what eventually flunked me out was I failed the swimming test (Chris: Oh!). So this was, I think, one of the childhood shortcomings is I never really learned to swim very well and indeed, I frankly, have a little bit of a phobia of of water. So for ambitious young people listening to this podcast, get a great education and and learn to swim if you want to be an astronaut. Chris Yip 13:13 Perfect. How's your writing going now? How are you able to fit writing into what you're doing now and you call it like your day job in a sense? Eric Choi 13:24 Well, writing is work. It's a very enjoyable form of work, but it is work out nevertheless and certainly for people like myself who have a day job and people have personal commitments and family commitments, it's really difficult to fit writing into all that. And ultimately, it does become another job, it becomes work. My writing technique, perhaps influenced by my engineering background, tends to be rather methodical. So I start out doing a lot of research and I plot out stories with a fair degree of detail before I even start writing. So I've got pieces of paper, I do primarily do the initial planning analog style, with paper and lots of sticky notes, and I scrawl things, and I move the pieces of paper and sticky notes around but it's kind of like having a solid model or a blueprint. And you know, writing is a creative process. There's no right or wrong way to do it. This just happens to be the way that I am comfortable doing it. And ultimately, it's about producing words and producing pages so when I'm starting, or in the midst of of a writing project, I sort of make myself write and the goal is that I shall write one page, at least one page a day. And if I'm in the middle of a writing project, I will have a day book or a calendar where I write down the number of pages that I have written on a given day? And if it's two in the morning, and I haven't written my page yet, I will stay up until I've written that page. Chris Yip 15:09 So you mentioned earlier, when we were talking some of your influences whether it's Asimov or Heinlein or Bova or Faulkner, I think you described this as sort of hard science fiction. Is that the way to frame it and what does that mean? Or how would you describe what that is? Eric Choi 15:26 Yeah, I think, again, this is a reflection of my own engineering background and my interests. But as you say, I do tend to write in this genre of what is called hard science fiction or hard SF. If we sort of look at the classic definition of that, it's the idea that the story is based around some element of science or technology, and that element is so central to the plot, that if you were to remove that, you would basically have no story. And perhaps the sort of prototypical example of that is for Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. So the central scientific, in quotation marks, "element" of that is, of course, the monster. And if you were to take away the monster and the creation of the monster, what would you have? Not a lot. You'd have maybe like this bored medical student wandering around in Switzerland. So I find that to be a very interesting definition of science fiction, it's certainly not the only one, but if we were to apply that to some of the media or franchise types of science fiction, you can think of something like Star Wars, for example, that, strictly speaking, if you were to be very literal in that definition, that's not really science fiction, because you could largely retell those Star Wars stories in a western motif or as samurai stories, even. So I think the way I think of it is, you know, having that scientific or technological element, and that indeed, that scientific and engineering element that's portrayed in the story is also consistent with either our current understanding of science or engineering or some reasonable extrapolation there of and as an engineer, I really find this type of speculation a lot of fun. Chris Yip 17:21 Yeah. So I've read and I am going to say, I consumed your short story book over the space of, I literally went through it, because there are short stories, and it was terrific to read. The one which is very relevant to what we're just talking about right now is one called Plot Device (Eric: Okay). And so maybe you want to tell our listeners a little bit about what the storyline behind Plot Device? Because it seems very close to what we're talking about here, right? Eric Choi 17:49 Well, it's a little bit of a scary future where I postulate that in the near future, there will basically be AIs that will take the place of writers. Certainly, I think, to some extent that's happening in nonfiction pieces where you can autogenerate text to some degree but what the plot device story postulates or imagines is a near future where AIs have gotten to the point where they can actually emulate and create their own fiction and actually have what I call "artificial creativity". So there have been a few interesting things recently, and you know, as part of doing the research for writing some of the material in this collection, I came across something called NaNoWriMo. So this is the National Novel Writing Month where people, human beings, take the month of November, and sort of dedicate themselves to write a novel and what I had not been aware of is there's actually something called NaNoGenMo, where the goal is to write a computer program to develop an AI to write the novel for you and this is something that apparently has been going on for a number of years now at universities in North America and Europe. So it seems to be happening where we're going in that direction, and we'll see how long it takes. Before writers like me become a little bit obsolete. I certainly hope that's not soon. Chris Yip 19:29 Can you pick an example of a recent movie that you would classify as hard sci fi or are there examples like that? Eric Choi 19:38 Well, I very much enjoyed both the novel and the film adaptation of Andy Weir's The Martian (Chris: Yes). I think beyond the technological aspects of the Martian story, what I think Andy Weir really got right and I really tip my hat to him for this is what is portrayed is the notion of teamwork that, you know, Mark Watney didn't save himself from Mars by himself. There was a huge team back on Earth spanning not just his own organization, but eventually people across the world to try to save him and to bring him home. And this goes back to my earlier comments about one of the fundamental influences of my time in Engineering Science at U of T, the importance of collaboration and teamwork and working together, because ultimately, this is how problems are solved is we work together through collaboration. Chris Yip 20:45 I wanted to mention, one of the things which I also loved about the book is the fact that you have this afterword, which talks a little bit about the technologies and maybe explain a little bit why that was so important. Eric Choi 20:59 Yeah. So part of it was driven by the fact that Springer is traditionally or perhaps is better known as, as more of an academic publisher and so it frankly, made perhaps a bit of an aside, it was actually a surprise to me, a pleasant surprise, that they indeed had this science and fiction line where they publish science fiction like this. So that was really kind of the reason, so when I was working with the team at Springer and the editor at Springer, this was something that was highly encouraged. The title of the book is called Just Like Being There and it's taken from the title of one of the stories that is actually in the book. And that story, the original story, Just Like Being There, was published as part of a volume of a series that was created by a person I mentioned earlier, the Canadian biologist and writer Julie Czerneda. It was called Tales From the Wonder Zone and so it was her ambition to use science fiction to illustrate scientific concepts for what was then, I believe, in the elementary science curriculum here in Ontario. And like Julie Czerneda, I also believe very strongly in the power of science fiction to not only entertain but also to educate, promote critical thinking and ultimately, I hope to convey a bit of a sense of wonder as well. And certainly, where we are now in the world in the age of pandemics and climate change, science fiction as a tool for science education or anything that we can do to advanced science education and science literary and critical thinking, I think is more important than ever. Chris Yip 22:48 It brings up an interesting question then in sorting of linking these together. What role do you think science fiction plays in real-life engineering? And which is the driver in a sense? Sometimes there's the driver, which is sort of these new technologies emerging, and then the science fiction becomes sort of how do these technologies lead to good or bad things. And the other is, do the writers actually help drive some of the ideas, the form factors, things like that going forward? What are your thoughts on that? Eric Choi 23:25 I think it's a little bit of both. Certainly, science fiction has very often portrayed things that would not become reality for years, decades or even centuries in the future and in terms of the first step, or the step zero of real-life engineering processes, it could be argued that simply imagining that something could be done that something is possible, is the first step in making the reality and certainly this is what happened with things like space travel, and other things like that and you've cited the examples of things like mobile devices and tablet computers that were envisioned in genre like Star Trek. And then it goes the other way, as well. There are people like myself and Julie Czerneda and Premee Mohamed and others who have a scientific or engineering or technical background, who have gone the other way and, and leveraged that towards telling stories that may in the future perhaps influence or inspire somebody else to get into an engineering or scientific field and create what was portrayed in fiction and that virtuous cycle hopefully just goes on and on. Chris Yip 24:42 I'm going to ask one off-the-wall question. You talked about The Martian being a great adaptation of a book. Are there adaptations or movies and things that you don't view, personally, don't like? It's an individual thing obviously, but that doesn't resonate well with you. Eric Choi 24:57 Well, I do have a pet peeve that I generally find the mad scientist trope to be annoying. The truth is, you know, obviously there are bad apples everywhere but the truth is that the vast, vast majority of scientists and engineers are, of course, not in quotation marks "mad" and in fact are working very hard for the benefit of humanity often in modest ways in terms of formal recognition or compensation or funding but they're doing it for the benefit of all of us. And indeed, what we've seen lately with the pandemic and climate change, if that's shown us anything, I think we really ought to be listening more to them. Chris Yip 25:43 As I said earlier at the beginning, these are phenomenal reads. So again, full congratulations on this really tremendous collection (Eric: Thank you so much). It's just, it's great. It is called Just Like Being There: A Collection of Science Fiction Short stories. It's out there, both in paperback or in an ebook format so I really recommend folks go out there and take a look at that. And then also your other ones, which you've co edited with other authors, because I think it's just such a great, great read and again, congratulations so much on this and all your success! Eric Choi 26:20 Chris, thank you so much. This has been such a fun conversation. Chris Yip 26:24 Yeah, really enjoy - I'm looking forward to the next collection! Eric Choi 26:28 I'll get right on it. Chris Yip 26:30 Terrific. Thanks again for listening to Coffee with Chris Yip. If you want to catch up on past episodes, or make sure that you don't miss the next one, please subscribe. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. Just look for Coffee with Chris Yip. You can also check out @uoftengineering on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn for more stories about how our community is building a better world. And finally, if you'd be inspired to join us, we'd love to welcome you. Whether you're thinking of taking a degree or working with us on our research project. You can find us online at engineering.utoronto.ca or you can visit our beautiful campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I hope I can join you for coffee soon.