Amanda Lohrey

But when you look at how it works in practice, it's kind of bad.

Elon Musk is a subscriber to the pro-natalist movement.

I think he has currently 13 children.

My research is telling me maybe now 14.

Well, who could keep up with Elon Musk?

I mean, really.

And is he at home to any of them?

One wonders, you know, kicking a football around, you know, you doubt it.

And many subscribers to this movement are Silicon Valley types, right?

And they occupy what I think of as a state of mad rationalism where they work everything out and they freeze their embryos and then they have their embryos checked scientifically for favourable attributes and then they have a table of favourable attributes so when the woman goes in to have her embryo implanted she takes number one on the list.

I'm not making this up.

This is how it works.

So I wanted to juxtapose certain social movements alongside the madness of alien induction and saying, look, who's mad here?

Yes, and it may be it does.

It may be that, you know, daily we are exposed to lurid dramas about the end of the planet and he thinks, he speculates that maybe this is a compensatory fantasy of a higher power that's going to rescue us.

No, no, on the contrary, I find it very difficult.

I think the secret to that observation is that I'm writing shorter books.

Right.

The Capture is, I think, 50,000 words.

I like short books.