Charles Liu

Wow.

It wasn't me, okay?

My family did.

I'm proud to have it as the name, but I always thought it was...

a little bit weird to put your name into the universe and claim that you had a real role in that.

Oh, yes.

And then there is lewd.

The lewd.

Yeah.

There's a famous, I don't know, human nature makes us think about monsters because when we have something that's unknown and we fear it, we want to explain it.

We want to put it in a context.

And so with me,

As a professional scientist, I still am driven by the unknown and the creative and the strange things.

Yeah, I love comic books.

I love science fiction and fantasy and everything like that.

And what we did as a species centuries or millennia ago, anything we didn't know, didn't understand and feared, we tried to personify or put into this concept of a monster.

make it more accessible to us.

And then years later, as we have learned more about our natural world, we see that those monstrous aren't monstrous at all.

In fact, they're very natural and it's scientific.

And that kind of connection and learning about these creative things makes us feel cooler and makes us feel better about the whole universe.