In episode 234 Peter is speaking to Richard Yonck who returns for his third podcast. This time Richard is here to discuss his first fiction book, Mindstock.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
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Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: We are living through the evolution of a post truth world. Its both personal and its also where our work opportunities occur. I think its very timely to get the chance to dive into a rich near future of how that post truth future might roll out.
Richard Yonck: Futurists have for decades called out the idea that there was a major pandemic eventually going to come around. And we want to be prepared, but we can't say exactly what year it's going to happen. And 2020 came along and COVID pretty much bore a lot of that out and was had a devastating impact on the world. The key event that sparks all of this for Mindstock is a global cataclysmic cyber attack that wipes out all information systems and also ends up impacting people's trust in the truth, which we're currently dealing with. The idea that we have created so much knowledge, so much incredible understanding of the universe, and at the same time we have reached a stage where a large a large part of the population and society is unwilling to accept or admit some of those truths. Ultimately, I feel if we lose information systems, if we lose our ability to trust in and believe in what's out there? We're very close to at least the starting point for this story. And I do think that this is a significant concern.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod, Richard Yonck returns for his third chat, and this time he is talking about his first fray into the world of fiction writing and his first book, Mindstock.
Peter Hayward: Welcome back to Future Pod Richard Yonck
Richard Yonck: Thank you so much, Peter.
It's wonderful to be here again with you for a third visit.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I just was checking. So December, 2020 podcast 79 co-evolving with our technology and about August 23. 164 the wild west of AI and technology. And here we are now. And you've moved. So let's at least what's between 164 and now, what your world is a little bit different, more we'll lean into some of it, but do you wanna just tell the listeners yeah.
What's changed?
Richard Yonck: Sure. Absolutely. So I consider myself based out of Seattle. This is home and where I work out of but have been traveling quite a bit during the past few years working in and living in other parts of the world. My wife and I just spent two years in Buenos Aires where you recorded you and I recorded the previous episode and a few months ago we moved to Prague in the Czech Republic where I'm doing some different work, working on the next book and so forth.
It's a wonderful adventure. Life is, but it also provides an incredible, influence and opportunity to draw in material for, further creation.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, it's a beautiful city too, Prague. It's stunning. And so what are you periphery or are you central?
Richard Yonck: Pretty central.
Pretty central. Not old town central. Yeah. That’s a little too touristy, but no an absolutely lovely city and pretty much in the heart of it.
Peter Hayward: Why move? Why, why have the wanderlust, why the wandering?
Richard Yonck: You can call it wandering, and of course I believe it was Tolkien who wrote not all who wander are lost. I for myself and for my wife, we both absolutely love travel. I've been traveling most of my life both in the US and later internationally.
And the adventure that comes with it, the new insights, the opportunity to meet people that are not like me who have had different life experiences. Certainly that's the case in the Czech Republic is a phenomenal opportunity. A few years ago, when years ago we talked about the idea that we would one day travel a little more extensively in the sense of living in places where it wasn't a two, three, even four week.
Period in a place to, pop in, pop out, but to actually establish ourselves in other communities in different parts of the world for an extended period of time in order to build, some very different community and different friendships, which we absolutely have, and it's been phenomenal experience.
Peter Hayward: Okay, so gone. Northern hemisphere. Southern hemisphere, back to the north, maybe Australia next time.
Richard Yonck: You never know. You never know.
Peter Hayward: And also you've always written and but you've written something. It'll be out for you to say whether it's different or not, that you wrote. Something else. You wanna just tell listeners what you've written?
Sure,
Richard Yonck: absolutely. So traditionally, or through the years, I've written primarily nonfiction, but have always intended and planned to one day shift into fiction. Fiction has had an incredibly significant impact on my life, who I've become The number of books and the number of views into the world that I've gained from being able to read ever since I was a young child, has been wonderful. I've just completed Mindstock, which is a science fiction techno thriller set in the near future. Mindstock is about a world in crisis - a crisis of truth - in which the world has gone through a global, a cataclysmic global cyber attack that has wiped out all information systems.
In doing so it's led to immense turmoil, it's taken decades for this society to come back to rebuild. And in the course of this its social and power structures have undergone immense transformation. At this point, we're talking about a society that is inundated with conspiracy theories, with complex, deep fake intrigue, with all manner of misinformation, continually. At a level that is, that makes our current world seem quite tame.
In the course of this, a number of characters are trying to get to the bottom of what has happened to their world. And in the course of it are uncovering some very dark secrets. But as our protagonist Robin Sheridan discovers, reality actually may be the greatest conspiracy of all.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Richard Yonck: So that's it in a nutshell. Yeah. And it essentially is an opportunity to explore a very different future in a very different way than I normally would at a professional level.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. We will come back to the book itself, or you gave you, you did give me a, an, early, I have read the book and it certainly is a lot of fun to read.
I'm interested, before we go back to the book, and we certainly aren't gonna give spoilers away, but as a writer, but a writer in the futures space, which of course is a speculation by nature and thenmoving into what you say is the fiction state, I think it's a obviously there's a spectrum that we write on between, you can put hard nonfiction at one end and hard fiction at the other.
I would imagine it's a bit of a continuum for you in terms of how different, that kind of thing.
Richard Yonck: Sure. I think that's correct. As you, and as many of your listeners know scenarios are very much part of the futures, the futurist toolbox, as we kind of work through the different processes, methodologies that allow us to explore and to consider how the future might develop. In the course of writing, both articles, but also my last two books on the future of artificial intelligence. I routinely rely on scenarios in order to try to draw the reader in to be able to flesh out and to dimensionalize the impacts of different change of different possibilities in a way that is, I'm, for me.
It makes it much easier for a lot of people to talk about and explore what that could really mean, what the secondary and tertiary, knock on effects are things that are harder when you're just dealing with a set of facts, a set of statements. So we're creatures of story. We, we originated with this.
We continue through our lives, through our society to utilize story and this is very much a continuation of that moving from. Exploring the future and including scenarios to what is essentially one giant scenario. Yeah. And we'll talk about it I'm sure in a little bit, but also at a level that is not what we would normally do for a professional client or anything like that.
It's much more for entertainment, but also for to ins to inspire some conversation.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Yeah. So looking back before you'd written a fiction novel to now you've written one and obviously a sequel coming what surprised you in the craft of writing and surprised you in regards to yourself as the writer?
Richard Yonck: Sure. Fantastic question and my initial, the initial part of my response is as someone who has. Wanted to one day get to the point of writing novel utilizing the other. Side and incorporating scenarios and so forth was an opportunity to work toward this as well as obviously to create the actual works themselves.
As far as what's very different though. The process when I actually got to the stage of writing fiction was coming to understand that the process, the method is so very different. And of course it's different for everybody, but for me. Moving from writing nonfiction, which I consider to be very linear in its nature.
You create what is effectively an outline and flesh it out and go from A to B to C, and you have a framework and it generally speaking follows a fairly direct. A path that's pretty easy to imagine ahead of time and to implement the nature of writing fiction, particularly something where you're creating a world that does not exist yet.
Not just setting a dramatic story in the here and now, but to actually create another world becomes so iterative in the process you are building a world, you're creating characters, you're creating a narrative and a plot. And as you're doing, so you are re realizing as you're working through one of those that, oh wow, there's all of these other holes in this other part.
Now this doesn't hold, this doesn't work. So it's this continual feedback loop that is ultimately generating, ideally a. A good solid story. Were within the context of how we generally deal with narrative and fiction in our world. But the number of versions, the number of drafts, the number of dead ends and wrong way streets that I've been down is pretty significant.
So it's taken time and it's been a wonderful learning experience, but in the course of it, I do feel that I'm now able to write fiction in a way that I never could have before.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I would've, again, I've never tackled it and I'm never going to tackle it, but I would imagine that. The character that you create and how they respond to the situation is not of course you and how you would respond.
So I would imagine creating these characters that you travel through these imagined futures with, that they themselves tell you what they would do, and it wouldn't be necessarily what you thought that you would do.
Richard Yonck: Absolutely we, I think most of us have heard writers talk about the idea that the characters take on a life of their own.
They just start determining where the story's going to go versus where you thought it was going to go. I think that's very true. I think there's always going to be a part of me, ideally less than in some characters than others. Particularly a few of the more nefarious ones. But the nature of writing I guess it's invariably a blend.
There's me in there, but there also hopefully isn't, is other people that, and other personalities that I've either observed or created.
Peter Hayward: Clearly your nonfiction books are, influenced the way you wrote the world of Mindstock. But if you go back to nonfiction, are there things now that you think the fiction journey will now leak into the way you write your nonfiction stuff?
Richard Yonck: Great question. I actually haven't given a huge amount of thought to that. I can't imagine that it won't affect and hopefully improve. Scenario writing. I'd like to myself, in the course of writing nonfiction, move a little bit more in the direction of a narrative approach anyway, because that does engage readers a lot better.
So I think that would probably be the big, the biggest or best outcome for me would be incorporating that. That feature as much as possible.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Look, let's talk about now. As I say I don't wanna discuss the book because if people want to, if people hopefully hear what we're gonna talk about, they'll wanna buy the book and find out about this world.
But let's talk about. The world of Mindstock. And let's in fact start with the title and let's start with the subtitle, which is, Mindstock is the name of the book and the tagline is, the Truth Always Lies. So what can you tell listeners about the title and the tag?
Richard Yonck: Okay. We're going to avoid spoilers as we both have discussed.
The nature of the title was not immediate, and this is a just a little backstory. It actually had a previous title that we won't, I also won't divulge because it gives away another part of the story, but it was a very different, and I came to find out difficult concept and word for readers to, get their get to both to say and to remember. So I'm very glad for the change to this, it incorporates an element of the story, which will leave readers to discover. But the nature of the tagline. The truth always lies. I feel that there's an element, there's an element of truth to this in that what constitutes the truth in the world is often and increasingly it seems, based on your own personal perspective not that this should be always the case. Certainly there are truths that should be objective, but as we saw or as we read with Orwell's 1984 if you have a world that. Has enough power, has enough authoritarianism that the leaders can say two plus two equals five.
And that is the truth. Then we're talking about a very different experience for humanity. It's one that we should all want to avoid in the course of the developing the preferred futures that we are all. Ideally striving for not that's unified in any respect, but it's to my mind a very important aspect of this story to understand or to explore.
What are the futures that must never come about? What must we avoid at all costs?
Peter Hayward: The world of Mindstock is is what I would call a near term future. I dunno if you're familiar with my colleague Joe Voros, but when he presented what he calls the futures cone, he had his three Ps that he used to describe the future. There's the notion of the probable future, the possible future, and the preposterous future.
The future gets, wilder and milder. And then of course within that is a subset, the preferred future. Where do you think this world is in that kind of voros scale?
Richard Yonck: Oh, wow. I think it's a mix. I think that it's a possible future. In terms of a few of the events and a few of the technologies that occur here.
But I think that as an, as a futurist and as a someone with a significant science background, there is, there are a number of elements in there that definitely border on the preposterous. So I, I feel that it, it straddles like a couple of parts of Voros's cone, future cone. For me the aspects of where we are within the world right now with regard to truth and its supposed malleability and so forth, is where we're definitely in the.
The realm of the possible and the the possible and the potential. I'm trying to think a little bit about the idea, though, that as we saw with, futurists, let's take the example futurists have for years for decades called out the idea that there was a major pandemic. Eventually going to, come around the corner.
And in fact if, just like anything like this, we wanna be prepared, but we can't say exactly what year it's going to happen. And of course, 2020 came along and COVID pretty much bore a lot of that out and was had. Devastating impact on the world, at the level of a global catastrophe in some respects, what the key event that sparks all of this for Mindstock is a global cataclysmic cyber attack that wipes out all.
Information systems and as from the story, has a knock on effect on both knowledge and information, but also ends up impacting people's trust in the truth, which we're currently dealing with. We're, as you and I were discussing earlier. We're living through a period that some people have come to call a post-truth world.
The idea that we are in a stage where this, we have created so much knowledge, so much incredible understanding of the universe, and at the same time we have reached a stage. We're at a point where a large. Part of the world, a large part of the population and society is unwilling to accept or admit some of those truths.
Objective fact the nature of science, the nature of very significant double blind studies is taking less and less. Value for some people, in part because they don't, they haven't been exposed properly to the scientific process. It's is one part of it, but it's also the news channels the filter bubbles that exist because of the way social media and other media have developed.
Ultimately, I feel that there is if we lose information systems, if we lose our ability to trust in and believe in that, what's out there? We're. Very close to at least the starting point for this story. Yeah. And I do think that this is a significant concern. I think that it concerns many cybersecurity experts as well.
And it is a, at that level, a very real possibility.
Peter Hayward: I think for my point, Richard, that I think. Yeah, having a cataclysmic cyber war to achieve a situation where people don't believe in the truth, because there is no truth to believe in, is just an extreme version of what we're currently living through now, which is a much slower version where many people do not believe in the truth, even though the truth is findable.
Verifiable and in your world it is less verifiable, but people now are choosing to not verify or verify by means of their pre their preferred way of verifying, which is not necessarily using the expert or the canon or the establishment. As their thing that says you can trust me or you can trust that this is true.
They're simply saying I don't trust you, therefore I don't trust the things you say are true.
Richard Yonck: Yes. I think that we're in a very different stage in this regard. I think some of it we can look back to the early promise of the internet, of the idea of democratizing access to information for everyone throughout the world and this idea that everyone was going to have a voice with everyone was going to have, the ability to contribute to this global conversation.
That's a great. Dream. It's a great idea, but there were components in that it, that kind of fell short. Part of it is something I talk about routinely, which is the idea that when the internet was created it was established in 1969 under as ARPANET and was essentially a. Means of communication between the government and some research universities in the US there were only a handful of nodes early on, everybody knew who everyone was.
Trust was assumed. Unfortunately, we now live in a world where all of that has expanded to such a degree that trust can't or shouldn't be assumed, but the underlying foundations of the internet at this stage make it such that it's impossible to fully protect ourselves from the anonymity that it provides for so many people.
And as with most. Cyber attacks or si cyber crimes. As many experts will tell you, attribution is one of the key problems in all of this because trying to not just deter it, but determine who actually committed it where they are, who they are, is really hard. So I think these are all a, a.
Of the conversation or part of the reason that we're where we are today?
Peter Hayward: Yeah. I think, again, one of the things I really enjoyed in the book was I. There were solutions introduced to problems that had been encountered, and the solutions themselves then created their own sets of challenges. So the ongoing, this is not it was not simply trust went down down.
It was a, is that trust disappeared. Then Trust was recovered in a way, through a mechanism, through a social. Innovation, so to speak. And then off the back of that, then other things become possible. So again, I think it was nice to watch that problem solution, further problem, further solution, further problem.
That sort of almost the dynamic of the problem solution approach almost gave the book of the narrative a kind of perpetual motion.
Richard Yonck: Thank you for that. That's I really appreciate those kind words. Yes. In the course of wanting to tell a story that w was complex enough to hold the readers to hold my interest as a writer it, to my mind, it needed to have that kind of depth of exploring how these different.
Developments lead from one to another because that's how life works. That's how progress has always worked. We have, we develop a new technology and we have all of these great intentions for it, but we miss along the way. It's oh, wait a minute. It's going to lead to this and that and the other as well.
For instance, all kinds of, cheating issues within academia around chat, GPT the ip the intellectual property issues for so many writers, so many artists as their work has been scraped up into these large language models and large multimodal models that. Enable all of this amazing AI in the past few years.
This current chapter of ai, it's a much longer legacy of course, but it to my mind. It's the, it's, these things are the things that are worth understanding, that I love talk about when talking to clients, talking to other futurists, the exploration of not just, oh, what are what will these technologies allow us to do?
But, oh, where do things go wrong? How do they. Impact and affect not just our safety or security, but even our psyche. The nature of the current social media and mobile access to it has. Absolutely transformed our attention capabilities. An awful lot of people find it that much harder now to read long form to, to think in deep or focused ways that allow them to explore ideas at a deeper level because we're continually bombarded with so much distraction.
Peter Hayward: I guess if I take an historical line for this, the enlightenment believed that if we, through, through rationality and really through rationality we could get past the mystical and to to make. Truth accessible. We then of course had people like Toffler and others and then the, the sociologist like Zigmund Bauman that said, congratulations, you've now, you are now responsible for your identity, your personality, your culture, and everything else.
And as you said, we've seen a, we've seen a retreat bracket into, I'm gonna put boundaries around what I accept in order for me to have a sense of who I am. And we're back into the, I get to say what truth is.
Richard Yonck: Sure. Yeah. I think you, you're spot on. I think the reference to Toler is very apt. The fact is that we're in a period where we're so overwhelmed many people and many groups of people, are finding their belief systems challenged in ways that they never have been before, and it has a huge fragmentary or fragmenting effect on both the social fabric, the social cohesion, but even on people's own psyches and their own abilities to. Believe in and trust in the world and the reality that they live in.
It's leading to various forms of men, not just mental anxiety and depression, but even more significant mental illness for a certain subset. And these are. Realities of the technologies and the worlds that we're building right now. And it's, again, we have to take responsibility for this.
It's not enough to say, let's just build it as fast as we can and, build, what is it? Break things, break things fast, build fast and break things, move fast and break things. There we go. It's just not a viable. Responsible approach to things when, we, it's possible to actually build new technologies and try to incorporate into that process some level of, technology assessment in order to try to anticipate where are the problems, where are the pain points down the way, where we can try to build in ways to avoid AI bias or different kinds of vulnerabilities of whether it's of identity, security, privacy, et cetera, in advance, rather than trying to deal with it after the horse is out of the barn.
Peter Hayward: There must be things around us now that are attempts, adaptations pilot projects, ideas that people are pursuing that are, if you like, I won't call 'em antidotes, but are understandable given the growth of post-truth. So blockchain can be understood as a kind of reaction too. The problems of post truth, I would argue that the I got a mental blank on the Bitcoins, the what I called again,
Richard Yonck: Ethereum,
Just crypto coins.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Yeah, sorry. That's okay. And then, yeah, and the whole notion of, cryptocurrency, I see these as. Not completely about trying to take away post-truth, but I see them as developments that emerge from Post-Truth. Are there other things that you are sensitive to that are only at very early stages that we can look at just as the beginnings of some of the responses to Post Truth?
Richard Yonck: Sure. I think that you're right that blockchain holds some potential approaches to. Helping to manage or helping to deal with this, but again, whose truth, are we talking about this? This in and of itself is part of the problem. W in terms of what I was speaking about before, the vulnerabilities of the internet and so forth.
People have talked for years about the idea of a new version of the internet, whether internet, whatever we want to call it, 2.0 or 20.0. The, there are. It, that sounds idyllic, but it's also, incredibly prohibitive from a cost standpoint and infrastructure standpoint. That's going to be a challenge as well.
We've got what we've got and we're going to be building solutions and problems on top of it for a long time to come. With regard to those solutions, there are companies that are developing different. Means and methods of helping to identify the the fake news, the fake material as well as, just the generally AI generated text out there.
And this is, these are tools that especially if automated and can be trusted and verified in their own way hold some hope for being able to add some level or layer of. Improvement to our current problem. But it's an ongoing battle. There's no two ways about it.
Peter Hayward: And also I would imagine one of the great challenges for our present going into the emerging future is who has control of these technologies?
There are almost none of them now that are under very much govern governance by any. Political system around the world, they seemingly are completely outside of the political governance systems of the world.
Richard Yonck: I think that there's some degree and that, different governments different countries try to, maintain differing levels of control, but ultimately, this is what I'm exploring in the story of Mindstock is how. How do we even deal with this as we move into an era when people have, grown up believing that you know so much out there is fake, is wrong, is untrustworthy. It's just too easy to say or to come to believe that, something that you don't care to believe in or want to believe in is ultimately a conspiracy to make you believe that. So it's a huge. Conundrum because we just ha we've created our, I don't wanna say our own undoing, but essentially this is a problem of our own making that will haunt us for a very long time.
I think,
Peter Hayward: We had the we had the Oppenheimer film last year, which was again a fiction, it was a story based on. Yeah, something that actually happened, but the creation of the Oppenheimer story kind of. And of course, the Old Manhattan Project and the bomb's an interesting one because while it was done for national politics, it was very much controlled by the scientists themselves who were building the bomb.
And the Oppenheimer character was, this pivotal person who understood what the scientists were doing. But of course, post, post World War ii, the science of nuclear war continued. You had, pug wash formed. All the scientists who basically said we, we have to be the ones who advise government how they manage this because government doesn't understand how to manage it.
It can't understand, and I see the same thing happening with the technology we're talking about. I think it's beyond the ability of government to understand what it is that needs to be done. It almost has to come from within the technology field. To help the governments come up with governance.
Richard Yonck: A great point.
As I talk about regularly, the decades ago the US had its office of Technology Assessment, the OTA, which was brilliant. It ended up providing a hu a model for countries all over the world. Essentially the idea that so much of what technology is developing is complex enough, deep enough that in order for political representatives to be able to make informed decisions, there needed to be a group that could distill this.
Both in terms of the volume, but also in terms of the level of detail and level of explanation so that they could actually take it in and incorporate it into their decision making process. Great idea. Fabulous. Come the early 1990s in the us that got defunded for political reasons. It went away.
We've had different, aspects of it incorporated into a few other offices in government. But generally speaking, that doesn't exist in the US the way that it once did and could still be providing an enormous benefit. This is what we need in order to. Have our representatives make informed decisions.
That said I will also one more plug for the book. The fact is that I do not believe we can put all of our. Belief and trust into the technocrats, into the technologists and the scientists themselves. They're flawed humans like everybody else. And this is not a panacea. It is not the way that we're going to build a better world.
It's a direct, it's a way to create a very different kind of problem for ourselves.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Yeah. We don't now, elites are part of the problem for many people such that you can't trust elites, therefore you defund elites. And whether it's universities being tackled, whether it's government agencies being defunded, we seeing it around the world that politicians win votes when they say.
We are going to take action to get rid of these people that are trying to tell you what you should do.
Richard Yonck: Yeah, unfortunately, and this is a,
Not to pick on the US but the US has a long, centuries long what shall we see trend of anti intellectualism that has developed over the years where a faction believed that?
People with training, people with education, people who have spent a lifetime learning about a particular subject, the nature of specialization and how the enlightenment and the scientific revolution have created the world that is around us that we're all benefiting from. That they are not to be trusted, that these are people who have agendas who don't.
Necessarily speak the truth. And this is a problem. It's a.
Large, significant parts of society believe that their opinion is as valuable or more valuable than relatively objective. Scientific fact is a huge problem, and it did not exist in. Our premed world when we had much smaller communities that essentially relied on that information to survive and to thrive.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, one of the I mean you're in Europe now. You are seeing, you must be seeing the same anti-intellectual trends that you mentioned in America and, but yeah, Europe too has a strong strain of anti-intellectualism. It's not a distinctly American product. Europe constantly fights between.
The notion of, the principle view and then, the more populist view.
Richard Yonck: Sure. I think it's a, an a, a problem of human nature. I think there's, this is something that, you're right, it's un comparatively universal. It's not, as extensive everywhere as certain other places.
But overall there are, this trend exists everywhere. It's the perception that people. Want to have agency, they want to have the ability to determine their their own future and believe that putting themselves in the hands of others for. A range of things is working against them. And unfortunately that works only up to a certain point.
So that's the world we do live in. And yes communications media has contributed a large part to a large part of that problem, I believe, but not through anything. Inherently wrong with those technologies. Simply the fact that they are, it's the nature of increasing and democratizing those voices.
Peter Hayward: Let's jump back to the book. Who should read the book? Who do you hope reads the book?
Richard Yonck: Oh, man. First and foremost, it's a work of science fiction, but in many respects, it's shouldn't be seen as, hard science fiction so much as a techno thriller. That's how I tend to think of it or talk about it as a techno thriller.
It is intended for. Readers of a good story, a good narrative. Ideally people who like a bit of complexities to the point where they don't know what's coming around the next corner or the next chapter. I do hope and believe that a lot of people in technology will also want to read it but.
In the end if you like a good thriller, if you like a story that keeps you guessing I highly recommend it.
Peter Hayward: I do too. But I was thinking, Richard, that for parents, I'm not a parent, but I know a lot of. They struggle with the futures that their kids are moving into. They look at the world that they've grown up in and they look at the world around them now, and they wonder what's it gonna be like for kids?
And the kids themselves are trying to work out what's gonna happen to them as well. Is it a book you hope that people might read, not necessarily just for the adults to read, but maybe for some of the kids to read and talk about with their parents?
Richard Yonck: Sure. It's not that. It's I read all manner of things as a very young kid I don't feel that necessarily traumatizes one to read a little ahead in terms of your, what makes sense to you socially and in terms of maturity and so forth, but.
I think of it as potentially of interest or a good read for young adult readers that, that group, I would not want it in a primary school library, for instance. And honestly I think we both can agree that the vocabulary such that it's probably too challenging for a, a very young reader anyway.
But it is. Something I want to see read far and wide. I love hearing from the readers already about what they've enjoyed, what characters they love, who resonates with them, what aspects make them worry or hopeful and so forth. There's a lot of. Good things out of it, as well as warnings,
Peter Hayward: good. I, as I said, I took it as both a rip roaring story. There's no question. It's that, but it's also got, like any good story. It's sitting on the knife edge of a moral thinking. Is this a future that we want? Is this a future that we can prevent? Are there aspects in the future that we can encourage?
I think it is deliberately putting the reader at the sense of saying, yeah, we follow the excitement in the story, but we're also the mind's going, are we hitting there anyway?
Richard Yonck: Sure. In writing it, I had a bit of my future has ha futures hat on of course, but, a range of developments in the PA past couple of years.
It's been a, a long. Process of writing. As I say, it took me a while to unlearn nonfiction writing, but the events of the last few years have seemed to have made it suddenly that much more relevant and that much closer to the world that we live in today, which I think should concern us. Yeah.
Peter Hayward: In terms of the book and the publishing and the formats and the ways that people can engage with it. As books are not just now the bit of paper that you carry in your, that you carry in your hand. There's many ways to engage with. Books.
Richard Yonck: What's yours? Okay. This is published through a small press Palabras Publishing.
It's available in hardcover, in paperback, in ebook which is readable in most electronic readers and hopefully in the near future in an audible version as well. Yeah, I thought that was. It's available on Amazon. It's at Barnes and Noble. Other independent bookstores I can see are already carrying it.
The book releases since we're recording right now, the book will. Already be out by the time any of your listeners hear. But we're a couple of days ahead right now of the actual publication date of September 16th. It can be pre-ordered right now on for eBooks, but by the time anybody's listening, it should be available in all formats.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, we'll have all those, all the links to all the formats and all the ways for people to access it as part of your. Page of the podcast. And you've mentioned, and of course the book itself suggests that we might have a follow up book. How's that traveling?
Richard Yonck: Very well, thank you. And thank you for mentioning it.
Yes it, Mindstock is conceived of as a series at the the set, the next book in the series is Patternista, which will make sense to anyone who has read about five pages into, six pages into the book, and is essentially the second in a series I've conceived of as a four part four book series.
Peter Hayward: Cool. Cool. I'll definitely be tracking it. I'll be tracking it down. It was it was good fun. I want to know what happens next. Thank you. So Richard wonderful to catch up and hear about you and your journeys now into the Czech Republic and the beautiful city of Prague. And congratulations on the book and thanks for coming onto FuturePod.
Richard Yonck: Thank you so much, Peter. It's always a pleasure to speak with you and really appreciate you taking the time to read the book and enjoy it and hopefully your listeners will too.
Peter Hayward: Thanks, mate
Peter Hayward: Thanks to Richard. If you enjoy relevant near term futures Sci Fi and a pacey yarn through a world that seems very familiar to where we are then I do recommend Mindstock. Now available in the usual places. Future Pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the pod, then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me today. Till next time.