Deliver Us, a 2018 novel by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite, takes a hilarious take a look at the way forward for drone supply. The plot revolves round a social media activist named Piper Prince who makes an attempt to cease Amazon from taking up her Detroit neighborhood.

“It’s written in a Coen brothers sort of tone,” Robinson says in Episode 561 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “A Big Lebowski sort of tone. I wanted the world and the characters to be slightly pitched up from reality. So Jeff Bezos and his S-Team are characters in the book, and they are a little bit like the boardroom characters from The Hudsucker Proxy.”

Robinson sees Detroit as the proper setting for a novel concerning the collision between social justice activism and breakneck technological disruption, given town’s wealthy historical past and unsure future. “It’s a place that was the arsenal of democracy,” he says. “The Jetsons future is a future that was extrapolated from what Detroit used to be. Detroit was the place of the greatest technological innovation in the US for a while.”

Robinson labored onerous to get the small print proper, assembly with varied members of the Detroit neighborhood and likewise doing in depth analysis on Bezos. He additionally bought suggestions from his spouse, writer and activist Amanda Knox. “As he was writing it with Gavin, I was reading everything they wrote,” Knox says. “I was telling them when I thought, ‘This feels long, this feels overexplained, go into this more, this is super funny, this is not so funny, I don’t really understand this character’s motivation.’ All of those little factors that go into how you write a story.”

Readers may anticipate Deliver Us to be firmly on the facet of the activists, however Robinson was cautious to painting each side of a sophisticated argument. “I think that’s one of the things that ties Amanda and I together is that we don’t really believe in evil,” he says. “We believe in humans who are complex and flawed, and who are many things at once. And I think that about Bezos and Amazon as well.”

Listen to the whole interview with Christopher Robinson and Amanda Knox in Episode 561 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And try some highlights from the dialogue beneath.

Christopher Robinson on his viral wedding proposal:

There was a knowledge crystal from the longer term that had rocketed again in time, and on that information crystal, within the crevice of a smoldering meteorite, it had a fractured, partial entry from the Encyclopedia Galactica concerning the Knox-Robinson coalescence, which was the longer term union in life collectively of Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson. So it was an encyclopedia article about us and our life collectively. When Amanda got here and found this I used to be like, “Oh wait, I was thinking about doing this, but I guess it already happened in the future. So I guess I’m doing it now?” She didn’t know what was taking place. She thought possibly I used to be main her on a scavenger hunt.

Amanda Knox on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

That bought me by way of some tough occasions in jail. Douglas Adams was my go-to. I had The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that stored me firm in a really tough time. I used to be in a cell with 5 different individuals, and considered one of them was unpredictably violent, and I spent quite a lot of time simply sitting on my bunk making an attempt to be invisible. I had earplugs in my ears so I wouldn’t need to take heed to individuals screaming, and I simply wanted some escape, and it was the proper escape for me as a result of it was so gentle, it was so enjoyable, it was every little thing I wanted in that second. It was every little thing my actuality wasn’t.

Christopher Robinson on characterization:

I really created D&D-style character sheets for the entire characters in Deliver Us, to attempt to absolutely think about who they have been. Obviously they don’t have a “move silent” talent or “pick lock,” however I changed these with social abilities and issues that individuals in our trendy, up to date society would have. So as an illustration, for every character I knew what their “flirtation” talent was, and I knew what their “navigate awkwardness” rating was. And I considerably arbitrarily assigned these issues. I additionally had “What are the five items they have on their person at any given time?” I knew the reply to that query for each character.

Christopher Robinson on the Labyrinths podcast:

We did one episode of Labyrinths with this man Itiel Dror, who is among the world’s main consultants on cognitive bias, particularly because it impacts forensic science, which is tremendous fascinating. Because lots of people suppose that issues like fingerprinting is only a reduce and dry science. A print both matches or it doesn’t. But the truth is it’s far more of an artwork, as is DNA comparability and evaluation, one other factor individuals have a tendency to consider as only a cut-and-dried science. And Dror has proven, by way of some very intelligent research designs, that these persons are extraordinarily topic to the assorted cognitive biases that afflict us all, such that in the event that they’re instructed extraneous info like {that a} suspect confessed, they are going to typically change their evaluation and say, “Oh, well actually this print does match,” when earlier than they thought it didn’t. And that’s very troubling.

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