Abby Goldsmith’s science fiction novel Majority tells the story of a gaggle of younger individuals from Earth who get kidnapped by the Torth, a galaxy-spanning civilization dominated by cruel telepaths.

“There’s a galactic empire, and these people are all neurally, superluminally connected,” Goldsmith says in Episode 550 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “They can communicate instantaneously, and they vote on everything. It’s mob rule taken to an extreme.”

The Torth mentally surveil one another always, competing to construct audiences of “orbiters,” and abstract execution awaits any Torth who goes in opposition to public opinion. Parallels between Torth society and the web are apparent. “Here in the information age, in the social media age, we all see more and more what’s happening,” Goldsmith says. “Social media’s not the best for mental health. We see dogpiles online and that sort of thing.”

Goldsmith has been engaged on Majority and its sequels because the early 2000s. She says that even again then she had a nasty feeling in regards to the course of web tradition. “I had a friend in high school, and we would get on AOL chat, and she would just lie to people, straight up fool them,” Goldsmith says. “She’d be really manipulative, and I would watch her do that. It was very easy for her to sucker people in. And I was like, ‘Wow, lying is going to be a thing.’”

She hopes her books will function a warning in regards to the risks of social media. “We’re just at the beginning of, I think, an age of this, so I really wanted to explore that and take it to its logical conclusion,” she says. “Mob rule, where everyone votes on everything, we don’t even have that yet in our world. But I think it’s going to come. I think we’re going to see it at some point.”

Listen to the entire interview with Abby Goldsmith in Episode 550 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And take a look at some highlights from the dialogue under.

Abby Goldsmith on feelings:

[The Torth] don’t need intense feelings of their society, so that they’ve outlawed that, and by extension plenty of friendliness, that form of factor, is simply out the window. So love doesn’t exist. … I believe in science fiction there’s at all times been type of a vibe that feelings are unhealthy, and having household and having associates is horrible, like with the Jedi Knights. To be a superb Jedi Knight it is best to reject household and associates, principally. And with Vulcans, it’s like, “Oh, we don’t have sex or relationships. Maybe once every seven years we have an orgy, and that’s it.” And that’s speculated to be a superb factor? So I used to be at all times like, “Eh, I don’t see that leading anywhere good, personally.”

Abby Goldsmith on the movie business:

I wrote to Disney as a 15-year-old, “How can I work for you?” They despatched again an inventory of all the universities I ought to go to, and I used to be like, “All right, number one on the list is CalArts. I’m going there.” … The 12 months earlier than I graduated there was a job honest, and I bought a proposal from LucasArts, and so they had been like, “We’ll pay you $50,000 a year to start, and you can work on the new Star Wars films.” And I used to be like, “Nah, I’m going to finish my schooling because I’m sure it’ll be easy to get a job, no problem.” And then the very subsequent 12 months Disney laid off 800 characteristic movie animators, and the business was flooded with these individuals. So college students like me didn’t have an opportunity. It was fairly ridiculous.

Abby Goldsmith on the Torth sequence:

Having the entire sequence prewritten I believe in plenty of methods is a superpower. I’ve observed Michael J. Sullivan together with his Riyria sequence, he did that as effectively, and the sequence he wrote could be very cohesive for that purpose. I believe plenty of sequence authors, they begin to meander or lose the thread if they’re publishing as they go. You see that loads with sequence authors. It’ll dwindle into stats or melee battles, or they’ll simply not end the sequence, or they’ll finish it with a large, tragic accident the place everybody dies. … With the supergenius [characters], I used to be ready to return and make it possible for these supergeniuses had been up to the mark. So they do come throughout as good. They at all times know what’s about to occur.

Abby Goldsmith on Royal Road vs. Wattpad:

I relaunched your entire sequence on Royal Road, and a part of the reason being that Wattpad has type of misplaced plenty of the discoverability options that made it so nice. I nonetheless had the identical readership, however no one new was coming in. And I’ve heard that from plenty of Wattpad authors as effectively. People that had one million reads on their sequence had been unable to get anybody to note their subsequent guide. And in the meantime I’m listening to all types of loopy tales from Royal Road of authors who would achieve one million followers in a single day. I knew writers that had been incomes a full-time residing on Patreon from advance chapters from Royal Road. So I used to be like, “I absolutely have to try Royal Road. It’s no question.”

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