![Ambiguity Machines by Vandana Singh](https://www.powells.com/portals/0/images/vandana-singh-800.jpg)
Greetings! I am honored and somewhat terrified to be standing in front of you. I am here wearing three hats — although I am a science fiction writer, my identity as a physicist and educator, and my journey toward transdiciplinary scholarship of climate change, are not distinct from each other. Just to be clear from the outset, I lay no claim to any but the most superficial and incomplete knowledge of literary criticism or social theories. I am honored that my work has produced at least one PhD thesis that I know of, and has enabled some folks in this room to write papers, and has given headaches to unsuspecting undergraduates. A metaphor that came to my mind as I was trying to psych myself up for this talk was this: having me here before you is rather like particle physicists at CERN in Geneva inviting a proton to deliver a keynote lecture. The proton is just happy being a proton, and it is the job of the particle physicist to divine through experiment and theory the consequences of its proton-ness. The proton, in other words, can’t tell you very much directly — you have to infer things from it. I’ll try to do a little better than the proton...