dystopia – Rob Wolf: Recent Episodes
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https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8690992323.mp3Denise Crittendon’s debut science fiction novel, Where it Rains in Color, is set far in the future, long after the Earth has been destroyed, on the planet of Swazembi.
Swazembi is a color-rich utopia and famous vacation center of the Milky Way. No one is used to serious trouble in this idyllic, peace-loving world, least of all the Rare Indigo. But Lileala’s perfect, pampered lifestyle is about to be shattered.
Published on the cusp of Crittendon’s 70th birthday, the novel’s creation was decades in the making. Ideas were jotted down and relegated to a drawer while her work as a journalist and ghostwriter took front seat. Inspiration was gathered from her time in Zimbabwe and a recurring dream she had over many years.
“The dream influenced the novel a great deal,” Crittendon tells Brenda Noiseux and me on the latest episode of New Books in Science Fiction. “The novel was kind of built around the dream. When I finally started writing it again, then the dreams came back. And then I stopped and the dreams went away. When I finally got a chance to do that final push, I never had a dream again.”
That experience layers an almost metaphysical presence to a story that already includes a different kind of worldbuilding from what we normally see in science fiction. From Swazembi’s galaxy-renowned wind-force public transit system and nuanced cultural greeting of “waves of joy” to the noted lack of violence throughout, the novel offers a fresh perspective on what sci fi can be.
Before making the big leap into the world of sci-fi & fantasy, Denise Crittendon held a string of journalism jobs. In addition to being a staff writer for The Detroit News and The Kansas City Star, she was editor-in-chief of the NAACP’s national magazine, The Crisis. Later, she became founding editor of a Michigan-based lifestyle publication for black families. After self-publishing two manuals that empower youth, “Girl in the Mirror, A Teen’s Guide to Self-Awareness” and “Life is a Party That Comes with Exams,” she entered the new-age healing movement as a motivational speaker for teens. These days, she fulfills ghostwriting assignments for clients and writes speculative fiction on the side. She divides her time between Spring Valley, Nevada and her hometown, Detroit, Mich.
Read an Excerpt from the Episode on LitHub
Why Denise Crittendon Won’t Write About Violence
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN1463736781.mp3 People have always cared about their social status and how others perceive them, but advances in technology have changed how we ascend the social ladder, giving us new tools to manipulate our image and new measures of success as we seek “friends,” “likes” and the ever-elusive virality. In Joma West’s debut novel Face, climbing […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN3410067639.mp3 The Women Could Fly is set in our contemporary world with one big difference. A belief in witches gives rise to laws and a culture that encourages women to be married by the age of 30, locking them in a 1950s-style domesticity with the threat that they can be burned at the stake […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8530928015.mp3 Tochi Onyebuchi’s new novel Goliath features a phenomenon familiar to those of us who live in cities—gentrification. Like the gentrifiers of today, who push out old-timers with high rents and coffee boutiques, Onyebuchi’s urban colonizers are taking over property in communities that have suffered from underinvestment and systemic racism. But unlike gentrifiers of today, […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN7032018645.mp3 Destroyer of Light is Jennifer Marie Brissett’s long-awaited follow up to her critically acclaimed debut Elysium, winner of a Philip K. Dick Special Citation and a finalist for the Locus and the Tiptree awards. Elysium is set on Earth after people have been wiped out by aliens while Destroyer of Light takes readers to […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5728185596.mp3 Gautam Bhatia’s debut novel The Wall (Harper Collins, 2020) is set in Sumer, a city enclosed in an impenetrable, unscalable barrier that seems sky high. To its inhabitants, whose ancestors have lived there for 2,000 years, the place is more than a city or even a country—it’s their universe. Sumer’s residents know something is […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5584019256.mp3 Where does DNA end and the soul begin? It’s a question that Evelyn Caldwell, the brilliant genetic researcher at the center of Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife, never asks as she develops her award-winning technique for human cloning, which takes DNA from “sample to sentience” in 100 days. In The Echo Wife, clones are […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN1420718834.mp3 At the end of its life, the phoenix bursts into flames and a younger bird rises from the ashes. The roc is large enough to carry an elephant in its claws. The caladrius absorbs disease, curing the ill. The rain heron, which can take the form of steam, liquid or ice, controls the climate […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2011458897.mp3 The title of S. B. Divya’s novel Machinehood refers to an underground band of rebels (or terrorists, depending on your view) who threaten to unplug the world from the tech essential to modern life unless rights of all intelligences—human and man-made—are recognized and respected. The book opens with Welga, the story’s hero, ordering black […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN9938580791.mp3 Humans have found many ways to divide and stratify—by skin color, ancestry, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, health status, body type or size, and so on. The list is so long that it’s hard to imagine it getting longer, and yet debut author Chris Panatier has found a way. In The Phlebotomist, society […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN4641112285.mp3 Arranged marriages have been around for centuries, and in The Light Years, R.W.W. Greene imagines they’ll be around for centuries more. With the addition of speed-of-light travel, Greene’s character Adem Saddiq can sign a contract with the parents of his wife-to-be before she’s even born, take to space on his family’s freighter and return […]
In Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (Viking, 2020), residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits. Rob Wolf interviews the Welsh satirist about his new book.
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT7813919141.mp3 Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness is a poignant portrait of a mother and daughter fleeing the polluted cities of a near-future dystopia for a hand-to-mouth existence in the country’s last undeveloped tract. It’s also one of the unusual works of speculative fiction that’s been embraced by the world of high literature by (just this […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT5624182181.mp3
Writers and readers of science fiction love stories about artificial intelligence, robots, and mechanical beings whose sentience mirrors, matches or exceeds that of humans.
The stories stay fresh for the reasons stories about humans do—sentience confers individuality, which provides endless permutations for character and plot.
Madeline Ashby’s trilogy, The Machine Dynasty, explores the limits of sentience, the meaning of free will, and what it means to look, act, and feel like a human but be denied basic human rights.
Published in July, the third book, ReV (Angry Robot, 2020), shows readers the results of a final face-off between self-replicating humanoid robots and humans. That the robots, known as vN, want their freedom, is natural. What isn’t natural is the failsafe programmed into their consciousnesses that requires them to aid humans in distress or danger—or self-destruct.
With the failsafe in place, humans use and abuse the vN as they please—as mates, sex objects, laborers. “The failsafe became a way to talk about free will and consent,” Ashby tells me on New Books in Science Fiction.
Robot stories are usually written from a human perspective, but Ashby tells the story from the perspectives of the vN. “There’s a ton of science fiction stories about humans who can’t tell robots apart from other humans. But there are very few stories about robots who can’t tell humans apart from each other, or robots who are the ones judging what a human being actually is.”