Guests in Conversation: An Interview with Joan Slonczewski

The breast milk we feed our infants contains microbial communities to seed the infant gut-along with carbohydrates that only the microbes can digest. Do you see the symbiosis of different species in the Elysium novels-Sharer medicine or the manipulation/negotiation of microbial viruses-as a viable answer to what might be a medical complex grown too big and unsustainable? A potential for grass roots response to corporatized medicine? JS: [...]more importantly, whom are we studying-is it the grass roots resistance or the power of the city-state that we need to put under the microscope, like E. coli in an anaerobic environment? The microbial politics of Brain Plague was intentionally drawn to reflect (very crudely) historical shifts in human political thought over the past couple of centuries. Since one microbial "generation" is a day, four generations are a century, forty generations a millennium. Complexity, too, is a complex topic, and at times a contentious one in the scientific community-one might use as evidence the scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change within climate science circles, which offer many suggestions but are ultimately all equally unreliable.