‘Learning about physics changed my life’: author Hernan Diaz on his new novel Ply

Benjamin Thompson (0:03)

Hi, Benjamin here, welcome to episode 16 of Nature Hits the Books. In this episode, we're heading back into the world of fiction, and I'm joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz, whose third novel, Ply, has just been published. A quick word of warning here, we will be talking about specific plot points. Now, Ply takes place in a future that's in the middle distance, but it's a world very different from our own. Central to the novel is a futuristic particle accelerator, which although fantastical, has its roots in current physics. We talk about all this, as well as Hernan's journey learning about subatomic particles, and what he picked up during a visit to CERN in today's podcast.

Hernan Diaz, thank you so much for being on Nature Hits the Books.

Hernan Diaz (1:01)

Benjamin, what a pleasure to be in conversation with you. Thank you.

Benjamin Thompson (1:04)

So Ply is your third novel then, and it's a novel that's very much split in two, almost right down the middle, I think. Now the first half, there's a lot of world building going on. We're in a US city, maybe a couple of hundred years in the future. I mean, it's New York in all but name, which I know is where you live now.

But for whatever reason, society as we know it has essentially collapsed, and your characters are living in a bartering economy almost. Tell me a little bit about this world.

Hernan Diaz (1:33)

I think that the title Ply has many implications and connotations.

One of them is that the book takes place at a moment of what I like to think of as a historical fold. So modernity, wherever you want to pinpoint its starting point, for some it could be the renaissance, for others it could be the enlightenment, for others it could be the industrial revolution or World War I. It depends on how you think about modernity, right? But however you think about it, in Ply, this period in history has come to an end, and something new is being born. As you said, this entails new forms of currencies, new forms of societal organization, new forms of community. So we have lost a lot of things that are very painful to lose, mainly the state and all the legal scaffoldings that it ensured, right? But we've also lost things that were absolutely worth losing in this world.

Everyday life has been liberated and it's less salienting. Art is thriving and it's all in all a very free and egalitarian society. And this is why I don't think of Ply as a dystopian novel at all. I think it's the novel about a beginning. I think it's a novel about a new society in the throes of birthing itself, which is again, perhaps a little bit painful. But also I think the book is full of promise in that regard.

Benjamin Thompson (3:05)

My aunt lived in Manhattan in the very early 80s, and she used to tell me stories about what it was like then. And I definitely get a similar vibe that I think you're invoking here. There's this real punk aspect to it in many senses. I mean, literally, I suppose, right? There are a bunch of bands playing illegal shows all over the city, for example. I mean, you must have had some fun coming up with the band names first and foremost.

Hernan Diaz (3:27)

It was fun, but it's hard. Band names are difficult, man.

But yes, you are absolutely correct.

And I, for a moment, flirted with the idea of having this novel take place actually in the late 70s in New York City, right? But there are enough people around who were participants and protagonists of those scenes in New York and lower Manhattan during those years. And I was barely born and didn't live in New York. Then they feel very territorial about it as they should. It was a very important moment in history. And I could, I could just see the legions of quibblers gathering to correct all the facts that I would have gotten wrong. But if I like that moment, it's because the whole punk ethos is very, very important in the novel. I think of it as a punk novel. And also New York in the late 70s, early 80s, resembles very much the New York that appears in my book. And that is a reminder of how unstable, fragile and brittle the structures that we take for granted are, right? It only takes really kind of five minutes for everything to fall apart and for nature to reclaim urban spaces. I have amassed a vast collection of photographs and videos from New York at that time. And you can see that. You can see sort of the vegetation coming back. But the second aspect of the answer is that I ended up leaning toward a future setting because the novel is so concerned with technology among other things. And it seems to me that in fiction, the future is the natural habitat for technology. So what I did was I took this very gritty punk New York scene from the late 70s and kind of recreated it freely in the future.