New Books in Science Fiction: Recent Episodes
Marshall Poe
Bestselling and award-winning science fiction authors talk about their new books and much more in candid conversations with host Rob Wolf. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution. Recall This Book loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America? He came to Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation. On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books Discussed in this episode:
The Neveryon Series, “Racism and Science Fiction,” Triton (also referred to as The Trouble on Triton), “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Samuel R. Delany
In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
“The Science Fiction of Roe vs. Wade,” Palmer Rampell
Library of America Volumes, Ursula K. Le Guin (Delany disses them!)
A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject, William Wilson
I Will Fear No Evil and By His Bootstraps, Robert A. Heinlein
The Fifth Season Novels, N.K. Jemisin
More than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
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According to Merriam-Webster, noir is “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled, cynical characters and bleak, sleazy settings.” The Cambridge Dictionary says noir shows “the world as being unpleasant, strange, or cruel.” Nick Harkaway new novel Titanium Noir (Knopf, 2023) has all that but with a twist—rather than the fedora-wearing detective hired by a woman who just as soon stab you in the back and love you, the first-person narrator is P.I. Cal Sounder, hired by the police to help investigate the murder of a 7’8”, 91-year-old man who by all rights could have lived several more centuries. Sounder’s specialty is investigating crimes against Titans, the one percenters among one percenters, whose access to an exclusive medical treatment known as Titanium 7 enlarges both their bodies and their lifespans. The story is set hundreds of years in the future, when such miracle treatments become possible, but the book also sends roots into the past. The murder weapon, for instance, is a .22 Derringer, a small handgun not too different from the weapon used to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. “Killing someone with a gun is noir. Every poster of a noir movie is someone with a gun, whether it's a shadow with a revolver or a kind of Rico Bandello in Little Caesar. The gun is bound up with noir and vice versa,” Harkaway says. Nick Harkaway is the pen name of Nicholas Cornwell. As Harkaway, he is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker (which was nominated for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke award), Tigerman, Gnomon; and the non-fiction The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He has also written two novels under the pseudonym Aidan Truhen. His father wrote under the pen name John le Carré. Find out more about Rob Wolf and Brenda Noiseux. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Today I talked to Arin Greenwood about her new book Your Robot Dog Will Die (Soho, 2019). When a global genetic experiment goes awry and canines stop wagging their tails, mass hysteria ensues and the species is systematically euthanized. But soon, Mechanical Tail comes to the rescue. The company creates replacements for “man’s best friend” and studies them on Dog Island, where 17-year-old Nano Miller was born and raised. Nano’s life has become a cycle of annual heartbreak. Every spring, she is given the latest robot dog model to test, only to have it torn from her arms a year later. But one day she makes a discovery that upends everything she’s taken for granted: a living puppy that miraculously wags its tail. And there is no way she’s letting this dog go. Arin Greenwood is an animal writer and former lawyer living in St. Petersburg, Florida, with her husband, Ray, and their beloved pets. Arin was animal welfare editor for The Huffington Post. Her stories about dogs, cats, and other critters have appeared in many publications including The Washington Post, The Dodo, The Today Show's website, Slate, Creative Loafing, the American Bar Association Journal, Best Friends Animal Society's magazine, and more. She now writes and edits for animal nonprofits. Arin is also the author of Tropical Depression and Save the Enemy. Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In science fiction, aliens who come to Earth are usually scary and menacing, aspiring to destroy, conquer, or even eat mankind. But the aliens in Karen Lord’s The Blue, Beautiful World (Del Rey, 2023) aren’t interested in conquering or destroying; they’re interested in inviting Earthlings to join a Galactic Council. It turns out, however, that humans need a little time and training before they’re ready to assume the responsibilities of galactic citizenship. And complicating matters is the fact that humans might not be the only Earth dwellers to receive the aliens’ invitation. It’s not surprising that water and oceans figure prominently in Lord’s novel. As a Barbadian writer, she has a lifelong respect—and fear—of the water. “I'm kind of terrified of the ocean,” Lord said. “To give you context, there is literally a part of the island that you can drive to and look around and see three coastlines. But you can't see any other land from any of the coasts. It's an oddly isolating feeling, like you're standing tiptoe on a small rock—and you could tip over and crash into the ocean anytime. “I love living here, but when something bad goes down, it's like, boom, all of a sudden you realize the ocean is not your natural habitat. It's not making things easy for you. We are very much living on the skin part of land. We don't know the ocean. We don't know the surface of the ocean. We don't know the depths of the ocean. There is a huge level of respect and mystery that the ocean commands.” The Blue, Beautiful World is Lord's fifth novel. Her previous books are Redemption in Indigo, which received the William L. Crawford and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. That was followed later by a sequel, Unraveling. While The Blue, Beautiful World is considered a standalone story, it is set in the Cygnus Beta universe, which is where two of her previous books, The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, are also set. Rob Wolf is a writer and host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In The Shooting (4 Horsemen Publications, 2022), the first book in a trilogy, CK Westbrook superbly places real-life characters in a fantasy world filled with unthinkable environmental disasters while addressing major issues that face our world today. After almost every gun owner worldwide turns their weapon on themselves in a terrifying fifteen minute window, Kate Stellute, like the rest of the population, searches for answers. The mass-shooting is so enormous in scale and diabolical, no one can figure out who or what caused it, but after a bizarre encounter with an otherworldly stranger, Kate suddenly finds herself the government's prime suspect. A mid-level program analyst for Space Force and proud rule follower her entire life, a confused Kate doesn’t know where to turn. She puts trust in a neighbor, NASA biophysicist Sinclair, and with their combined background, they race to unravel the truth before an angry mob closes in. Kate knows she must formulate a plan to appease the otherworldly stranger, keep herself out of prison, and save the world from more violence…but is she already too late? Karyne Messina is a psychologist and a psychoanalyst with the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. She is on the medical staff at Suburban Hospital of Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is author of Resurgence of Global Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Mexican American writers make their mark in Science Fiction literature! In this first of a kind anthology, written solely by Mexican Americans, we are taken into space and near future barrios, to the other side of the universe, and onto post-apocalyptic worlds ala raza style. We have seen collections of futures of every kind, but not yet where Chicanada dominate the scene. Enter the world of El Porvenir, ¡Ya! - Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl -Chicano Science Fiction Anthology by Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press, an independent raza publisher. Authors: Ernest Hogan, Mario Acevedo, Frank Lechuga, Martin Hill Ortiz, Pedro Iniguez, Nicholas Belardes, Armando Rendón, Lizz Huerta, Emmanuel Valtierra, Rios de La Luz, Beatrice Pita, Rosaura Sánchez, R. Ch. Garcia, Ricardo Tavarez, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Carmen Baca, Scott Russell Duncan, Gloria Delgado, and Kathleen Alcalá. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny--a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy the journey.--from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective. Alex Kuchma is an MA student in history at York University. He has have researching hip-hop actively and collecting oral histories for more than a decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
This episode is a first for the Peoples & Things podcast: it features a guest host. It is something you will be seeing more of in the future. Guest host Aaron Benanav, assistant professor of sociology at and a senior research associate of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute at Syracuse University, and Lee Vinsel interview writer Cory Doctorow, the author of over 20 books including several best-sellers and multi-award winners and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about his new novel, Red Team Blues (Tor, 2023). Red Team Blues is a taut neo-noir technothriller that examines crypto technologies and the many social and economic inequities of Silicon Valley. The conversation puts Red Team Blues in the larger context of Doctorow’s career and writings. Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes. In Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan's edited volume Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (MIT Press, 2022), more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core SF texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies. The essays, international in scope, demonstrate the diversity of SF through a balance of popular mass-market novels, comics, films, games, TV shows, creepypastas, and more niche works. SF works explored range from Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, 2084: The End of the World by Boualem Sansal, Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman, Watchmen and X-Men comics, and the Marvel film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, to the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin, and the Wormwood trilogy by Tade Thompson. In an era in which ecological disaster and global pandemics regularly expose and intensify deep political-economic inequalities, what futures has SF anticipated? What survival strategies has it provided us? Can it help us to deal with, and grow beyond, the inequalities and injustices of our times? Unlike other books of speculative/science fiction criticism, Uneven Futures uses a think piece format to make its critical insights engaging to a wide audience. The essays inspire visions of better possible futures—drawing on feminist, queer, and global speculative engagements with Indigenous, Latinx, and Afro- and African futurisms—while imparting important lessons for political organizing in the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
“Soft sci-fi, gothic body horror” is how Hiron Ennes describes their debut novel, Leech (Tordotcom, 2022). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.Set in an isolated winter chateau, the novel weaves a surreal and atmospheric tale of a doctor who is part of a hivemind parasite, a twisted baron’s family, and a newcomer that threatens to destroy any perceived sense of order.Leech is an exploration of bodily autonomy, trauma, and a desperation to dig up the oppressive structures of the past. It is a multi-layered, multi-threaded slow burn that pays off for the persistent reader as the characters reveal their own monstrous, intertwined attempts at survival in the least hospitable of places.Hiron Ennes is a writer, musician, and medical student based in the Pacific Northwest. Their areas of interest include infectious disease, pathology, and petting your dog.Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invention, the professionalization of science was still developing. Wells viewed science as an incredibly powerful force. He knew it could either help or hurt humanity--even with that risk, he believed society should fully embrace science. When Wells wrote his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895, he kicked off a 50-year-long writing career. He was a pioneer in the science fiction genre, and his stories have inspired generations of audiences, artists, filmmakers, and other writers around the world. Sarah Cole is the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century and At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, among other works. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
How do women balance feminist identities whilst being science fiction fans? In Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the “Good” Fan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Neta Yodovich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa’s department of Sociology, explores the lived experience of feminist women who are sci-fi fans. The book shows their commitments to being both feminists and part of the sci-fi community, even where they face hostility and gatekeeping, personal ambivalences, and the reality of sci-fi as a problematic genre. Adopting an intersectional perspective, the book shows how race, age, and gender all play a role in the way feminist women interpret some of the biggest sci-fi franchises, as well as how they think about iconic characters. Crucially the analysis foregrounds the agency of feminist women sci-fi fans, demonstrating how they are challenging and changing the genre and its fan community for the better. Theoretically and empirically rich and deep, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in fandom! Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion (Orbit, 2022), the setting keep changing—the epoch, location, and technology—but the characters remain more or less the same as they carry out an expedition to a mysterious object at the behest of a private investor. The novel starts on a tall ship in the early 1800s in waters in the Arctic, then jumps to a paddle-steamer near the Antarctic, then a dirigible over Antarctica, and eventually concludes in the future on a submarine-like explorer under the ice of Europa, the Jupiter moon. The story is a puzzle, challenging the reader to figure out which if any place and time is real. Adding to the mystery is the reader’s dependence on a first-person narrator Silas Coade, the expedition’s physician. Is the story a book he is writing, a delusion, a series of alternate realities or something else? Reynolds says his original intention with Eversion was to “recap the entire history of science fiction … We were going to start in a kind of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe mode. And then it was going to go into sort of Jules Verne and then maybe a bit of H.G. Wells, then a sort of early pulp sleuth thing.” That would have been followed by classic space opera and episodes in the styles of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov followed by 1960s and ’70s new wave. “But once I started writing the book, I realized that there was no way I could bring sufficient variety to the craft to make those episodes work,” he says. “So I cut it down drastically to four or five episodes for the finished product. Reynolds is a former research fellow at the European Space Agency. He’s been writing fiction full-time since 2004 and has 19 novels and more than 70 short stories to show for it. His work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Arthur C Clarke and Sturgeon awards. He’s won the Seiun, Sidewise, European Science Fiction Society and Locus awards, and his stories have been adapted for stage and television. Brenda Noiseux are Rob Wolf are co-hosts of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Kim talks with Gina Dominick about Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” and the philosophical stakes of Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Le Guin’s story was published in her collection, The Compass Rose (Harper Collins, 1982). There are many PDFs of it scattered across the internet. Gina mentions Jacques Derrida’s writing on “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago UP, 1981). Much the same is true of the PDF scattering here. Gina Dominick is a medievalist, anti-capitalist rebel, and co-conspirator in the original high theory. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at NYU, who teaches high school philosophy and spent Halloween afternoon re-caulking her tub. She knows way more about Adorno than Kim does. By far. Image: “Leo was rescued off the streets of Harlem 3.5 years ago and has lived comfortably in a town house with two humans ever since.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality. Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and America, recap the history of early VR headset adapters on trains and compare various Japanese words for "virtual" and their antonyms. Paul wonders if the ephemerality of the views glimpsed in a rock garden served as guiding paradigm for how VR is experienced. Mentioned in the episode
Yoshikazu Nango, "A new form of 'solitary space'...." (2021)
Haruki Murakami's detailed fictional worlds of the 1980's onwards: real-feeling yet not actual history.
Walter Scott's Waverley novels: can we also understand the novel as an immersive machine that leaves readers half in their actual world?
Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with its interplay between enclosure and expansion, and its shrinking/expanding motif)
Ian Bogost on e-readers
C S Lewis's wardrobe as portal in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
Lukacs focuses on the dizzying and transformative scale in Naturalism in "Narrate or Describe?" (1936)
Wearable heart monitors as feedback machines for watching scary movies.
The pre-history of Pokemon Go is various games played by early users of VR headsets on trains.
Sword Art Online is a breakout popular example of Japanese stories of players trapped inside a game-world
Thomas Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life
We Met in Virtual Reality
Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined the concept of the metaverse.
Recallable Books
Madeline L'Engle The Wind in the Door (1973).
Cervantes, Don Quixote (1606/1615)
Futari Okajima Klein Bottle (1989)
Collections such as Immersed in Technology, Future Visions, Virtual Realities and their Discontents; also, other early VR criticism of the 1990s including early feminist critique, scattered across journals in the early to mid 1990s . Paul feels someone should put together those germane articles into a new collection.
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Part mystery, part thriller, with a splash of cyberpunk, Victor Manibo’s debut novel The Sleepless (Erewhon, 2022) imagines a near-future New York City where a quarter of the population has lost the need for sleep. Ahead of a corporate takeover, investigative journalist Jamie Vega discovers his boss is dead. Driven to discover the truth, Jamie continues to delve deeper, even as his own Sleeplessness spirals out of control. The world feels lived in and the mystery fits snugly within it. With good pacing and fully-realized characters, who bring their own morally ambiguous motivations to the table, The Sleepless keeps you guessing at what the characters could plausibly have done or could do next. Victor Manibo is a speculative fiction writer living in New York City, and his writing is influenced by his experiences as an immigration and civil rights lawyer. As a queer immigrant and a person of color, he also writes about the lives of people with these identities. Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). That novel brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. In this crossover episode, which originally aired on Novel Dialogue, where critics and novelists sit down together in peace, He speaks with John and with science-fiction scholar Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine. The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the “small feelings” that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie’s time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is “acute impostor syndrome” and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.” Mentioned in this Episode: --Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) --W. E. B. Du Bois on “double-consciousness” (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
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 (Tordotcom, 2022), climbing the ladder is everything. The way you act and dress, who you couple with, how you move and talk—it all adds up to “face,” which, in turn, determines your job, where you live, who you befriend and the quality and quantity of opportunities available to you. Every second—at home, in public or on the “In”(ternet)—is carefully choreographed. It’s a cold world, where even children are curated to advance social standing. With everyone—even enslaved “menials”—hiding their thoughts and feelings, people turn to anonymous confessors to express their emotions. Through a Rashomonic narrative where the reader re-experiences the same scenes from different characters’ points of view, West reveals the tensions underlying every interaction and the emotional cost of living in a society that values external success over internal well-being. “Face is a game, a way of life, a survival mechanism,” West says. “It's essentially everything that you are when you're on the hierarchy. If you're a menial you have no face, so it doesn't matter, but if you're someone on the social ladder of any kind, your face is everything. And it is what ensures that you are at the level that you're at, and it also ensures how you climb the ladder as well.” Joma West is a third culture writer whose work straddles both fantasy and science fiction. Rob Wolf is a writer and co-host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The Women Could Fly (Amistad, 2022) 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 for merely being accused of violating the rules. In Megan Giddings’ second novel, the reader must first grapple with the question: Are witches real? As the story progresses, the question shifts: Even if witches exist, why are they considered nefarious? “On a basic level, I just really wanted to write about magic,” Giddings says. “I wanted to write about a world where anything seems possible, but still people lean into their worst impulses and keep things small. … I wanted to show the ways that people constrain themselves. And I thought magic—something that could be limitless, something that could change anything—was the right way to get in there.” Megan Giddings is the author of Lakewood. She has degrees from the University of Michigan and Indiana University and is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. Brenda Noiseux are Rob Wolf are co-hosts of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and his turn to fantasy a disappointment. In Roger Zelazny (University of Illinois Press, 2021), F. Brett Cox surveys the landscape of Zelazny's creative life and contradictions. Launched by the classic 1963 short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," Zelazny soon won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with …And Call Me Conrad and two years later won again for Lord of Light. Cox looks at the author's overnight success and follows Zelazny into a period of continued formal experimentation, the commercial triumph of the Amber sword and sorcery novels, and renewed acclaim for Hugo-winning novellas such as “Home Is the Hangman” and “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai.” Throughout, Cox analyzes aspects of Zelazny's art, from his preference for poetically alienated protagonists to the ways his plots reflected his determined individualism. F. (Francis) Brett Cox is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University. In addition to his critical study of Roger Zelazny (recently awarded second place for nonfiction in the 2022 Locus Awards), he has published over thirty short stories, most of which appear in his collection The End of All Our Exploring: Stories (Fairwood Press, 2018). He has also co-edited the anthology Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (Tor, 2004). Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podbean.com/ and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Our first August rebroadcast was John and Pu's 2019 interview with SF superstar Cixin Liu (you may want to re-listen to that episode before this one!). Here, they reflect on the most significant things that Liu had said, and to ponder the political situation for contemporary Chinese writers who come to the West to discuss their work. They consider whether our world is like a cabinet in a basement, and what kind of optimism or pessimism might be available to science fiction writers. They compare the interview to a recent profile of Liu in The New Yorker, and ponder the advantages and disadvantages of pressing writers to weigh in on the hot-button topics of the day. Discussed in this episode:
Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End
Jiayang Fan, “Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds” (New Yorker interview/profile)
Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity
George Melies (dir.), A Voyage to the Moon
Fritz Lang (dir.), Metropolis
Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov
Transcript available here. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
It’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. For this episode, as part of the week’s theme of “ideas in strange places” we boldly go into the strange new worlds of science fiction, revealing how it’s long been a vehicle for radical thought. We dig into post-scarcity, Afrofuturism, and feminist speculative fiction as we set our phasers to fun and go where no podcast has gone before. This episode is a rebroadcast from our catalogue. We’re revisiting some of our favourites until the new season of Darts and Letters launches on September 18th.
First (@10:54), Cory Doctorow is a journalist, activist, blogger, and author of many books including the post-scarcity speculative fiction novel Walkaway. He takes us through the idea of a post-scarcity world as he breaks down the idea of abundance and what we might do with it, or not.
Then, (@34:52), Nalo Hopkinson is a science fiction writer, editor, professor, and author of Brown Girl in the Ring. She talks to us about Afrofuturism as a critical lens and different ways of seeing the future for different communities — and re-imagining the present. Plus, be sure to read her own recommendation: Sister Mine.
Finally, (@49:43), Batya Weinbaum is a poet, artist, professor, and the editor of FemSpec, an academic journal of feminist speculative fiction. She charts the history of feminism in science fiction and how art, including novels, helps drive social, political, and economic change.
—————————-CONTACT US————————- To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and Instagram. If you’d like to write to us, email darts@citedmedia.ca or tweet Gordon directly. —————————-SUPPORT THE SHOW—————————- You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. —————————-CREDITS—————————- Darts and Letters is hosted and edited by Gordon Katic; this episode our guest host and lead producer is Jay Cockburn. Gordon Katic is our editor. Our managing producer is Marc Apollonio. Our research assistants for this episode were Addye Susnick and David Moscrop. Our theme song was created by Mike Barber. Our graphic design was created by Dakota Koop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
A nameless young woman from This Place, and a nameless young man from That Place are stuck together when That Place, the occupying force, imposes another curfew on This Place. Author Nandita Dinesh never identifies the country, but the two protagonists share a language and much of their culture. They’re also falling in love. The young woman from That Place is a De-programmer, whose job involves interviewing the military troops now patrolling outside the house where she’s holed up with the young man. He is a Protest Designer, skilled at waiting out curfews, although his brother is supposed to be getting married the next day and there’s a lot of conversations about that. While confined with the young woman, the young man explains his strategies for passing time while under curfew. He wonders how his family and neighbors will react if he marries her. Where would they live? They swap stories about their families and respective homelands, and want to imagine strategies for ending the conflict, but nothing seems doable. This is an allegory for military occupations, like what we’re currently seeing in Ukraine, but it’s happened all over the world. This Place That Place (Melville House, 2022) is also a glimpse at what it might be like for hapless citizens to be imprisoned in their own homes. Nandita holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and an MA in Performance Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. An amateur cook who loves experimenting with Indian cuisines, Nandita has conducted community-based theatre projects across a range of contexts and in 2017, she was awarded the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy by Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. She was born and raised in Coimbatore, India and now lives in San Francisco with her husband and a 90-pound Doberman Mix named Mila. Nandita is currently working on projects across literary genres — a book that lies somewhere between a novel, a memoir, and a play being the next in line! G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The rich worldbuilding of a never-colonized North America sets the stage for this unusual murder mystery debut by B. L. Blanchard. Chibenashi is a broken man. He’s a peacekeeper for a small village, mentally stuck in place and trauma from the murder of his mother, the separation from his father who confessed to her murder, and his isolation from caring for his sister for the past 20 years. When another murder hits close to home, Chibenashi becomes closer to the investigation than perhaps he should be. The path to solving the crime sets him on a journey to discover the truth, but at what cost? Though the plot device may feel familiar, the world adds additional twists. Set in a modern, 21st century industrialized indigenous society surrounding the Great Lakes, the foundational elements such as the value of community and a non-punishment focused criminal justice system offer a unique lens to examine the threads of the case and Chibenashi’s understanding of what he’s taken as truth. B. L. Blanchard is a graduate of the UC Davis creative writing honors program and was a writing fellow at Boston University School of Law. She is a lawyer and enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
John and Pu Wang, a Brandeis professor of Chinese literature, spoke with science-fiction genius Cixin Liu back in 2019. His most celebrated works include The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record this interview. Liu spoke in Chinese and Pu translated his remarks in this English version of the interview (the original Chinese conversation is at 刘慈欣访谈中文版 Episode 14c). Mr. Liu, flanked by John and Pu (photo: Claire Ogden) They discuss the evolution of Mr. Liu’s science fiction fandom, and the powerful influence of Leo Tolstoy on Mr. Liu’s work, which leads to a consideration of realism and its relationship to science fiction. Science fiction is also compared and contrasted with myth, mathematics, and technology. Lastly, they consider translation, and the special capacity that science fiction has to emerge through the translation process relatively unscathed. This is a testament to science fiction’s taking as its subject the affairs of the whole human community–compared to the valuable but distinctly Chinese concerns of Mo Yan, or the distinctly Russian concerns of Tolstoy. Discussed in This Episode:
Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops“
Mo Yan, Red Sorghum
Read the transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
King Rao–one of the protagonists from Vauhini Vara’s novel The Immortal King Rao (W. W. Norton & Company: 2022)—is like many of the tech founders we idolize today. King comes from humble beginnings—born into a Dalit family in a coconut grove in India–moves to the U.S., and launches a company that ends up dominating the world. But Vauhini’s novel is also the story of King’s daughter Athena, living in the world created by her father’s company: a world of social credit, “hothouse earth” and “Shareholder Government”. The Immortal King Rao presents a techno-dystopia that may be recognizable for us today. But it’s more than just a warning about the future–Vauhini’s novel weaves together scenes from the past and the near future to tell a story about caste in India and the growth of our modern-day tech sector. Vauhini Vara has worked as an editor at the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, and as a journalist for those publications and others, including the Wall Street Journal, where she began her career. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in Tin House and McSweeney's and has been honored by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the O. Henry Prize, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her essay about grieving her sister's death, “Ghosts”—published in The Believer and adapted by This American Life—will be anthologized in The Best American Essays 2022. She is the secretary for Periplus, a mentorship collective serving writers of color, and a mentor for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. In this interview, Vauhini and I talk about The Immortal King Rao, how the experience of her family’s Dalit heritage motivated her to write the book, and what companies, perhaps, inspired the techno-dystopia seen in her novel. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Immortal King Rao. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
José Rivera's Lovesong (Imperfect) (Broadway Play Publishing, 2021) follows a passionate love triangle in an unusual situation: the US government has outlawed death, trees grow lights instead of leaves, and lovers sword fight as a form of flirtation. This play is a wildly theatrical, lyrical, surreal, and at times very dark work that will delight fans of Rivera's previous plays like Marisol and References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot, as well as new readers. In this conversation we discuss being inspired by Tennessee Williams, Rivera's research process for his screenplay The Motorcycle Diaries, and why he really wants to write a horror movie. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In this episode of How To Be Wrong, we talk with novelist New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Douglas Richards, about his career as a writer and how his started in the biotech industry. Doug is the author of 18 novels, his most recent being the science fiction thriller, Unidentified. Our conversation explores questions of changing paths in one’s career and also the complex and difficult work that goes into being a writer. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
One could call The Kaiju Preservation Society (Tor Books, 2022) a pandemic novel because a) John Scalzi wrote it during the pandemic and b) the pandemic serendipitously leads the main character, Jamie, to a new job that sets the action in motion. But the book is not about the pandemic. It’s about Kaiju, Godzilla-like monsters who live in an alternate Earth. This alternate Earth is rich in radioactive elements, and the Kaiju produce energy from their own internal biological reactors. This makes them a danger when, say, they end their lives with in nuclear explosion that thins the walls between Earths, but it also makes them an object of fascination for unscrupulous humans seeking new sources of cheap energy. “So much of the way plant life and animal life on Earth works is through sunlight, which is just another type of radiation,” Scalzi says. “Plants photosynthesize, animals eat plants, other animals eat the animals that eat the plants and so on and so forth. But sooner or later it all comes back to sunlight. The only places where you don’t have that happen are in very specific places where, for example, there are sulfurous heat sources at the bottom of the ocean. And then things have evolved to take advantage of the energy source there. Well, in this alternate Earth, things like uranium and thorium in the crust are another possible energy source. It makes sense to me that life would evolve to take advantage either wholly or in part of that additional energy source. And then, of course, I just built out from there.” Scalzi has contributed in myriad ways to the art of science fiction through many novels, his past leadership as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the platform he provides other writers on The Big Idea, a feature that appears regularly on his website. His writing has earned numerous awards, including what was once upon a time known as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, Hugos for Fan Writer and Best Related Book, and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Chinese science fiction has been booming lately through the translation of books like Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, but where did the current surge come from? In Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), Nathaniel Isaacson introduces the genre’s origins in China and tracks its development from roughly 1904 to 1934. During that period, China’s final dynasty, the Qing, came to an end amid European nations’ increasing control of China, the Republic of China was established, and Japan conquered Manchuria while the Chinese Communist Party was established and grew into a major political-cultural force. Isaacson connects these political shifts to the establishment of science fiction in China through key works by authors like Lu Xun, Wu Jianren, and Lao She. In so doing, he shows how Chinese science fiction is connected to Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, depicting authors’ struggles to subvert Orientalist attitudes toward China. Isaacson traces how Orientalism and its attendant colonialist projects were intertwined with Western scientific knowledge in such a way as to make science fiction a fruitful medium for cultural debates over China’s role in the world. Nathaniel Isaacson is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at North Carolina State University. His research interests include the history of Chinese science and science fiction, Chinese cinema, cultural studies, and literary translation. Nathaniel has published articles and translations in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures, Osiris, Science Fiction Studies, Renditions, Pathlight, and Chinese Literature Today. His book, Celestial Empire: the Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction (2017), examines the emergence of sf in late Qing China. His current book project, Moving the People: the Aesthetics of Mass Transit in Modern China, examines narratives of development as a theme in modern Chinese literary and visual culture primarily through the figure of the train. Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. She writes about Japanese media and is currently completing Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, a book about contemporary media and Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Andrew M. Henry is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Boston University and founder of the educational YouTube channel, Religion for Breakfast. Andrew has produced over 50 video lectures on a variety of religious studies topics, used by educators worldwide. You can follow him on twitter @andrewmarkhenry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Few writers are as qualified to set their book in a circus as Khan Wong, who has not only performed in a circus but is an internationally recognized hula hoop virtuoso. While Wong’s descriptions of acrobats, clowns and fortunetellers are grounded in real life, the pleasure moon that is the setting of his debut novel, The Circus Infinite (Angry Robot, 2022) arises entirely from his formidable imagination. Persephone-9 is a Las Vegas-like destination for members of the 9-Star Congress of Conscious Worlds, an alliance of nine species that includes humans. Into this diverse and raucous setting comes Jes, a young man with the unique power to manipulate gravity. A self-described asexual panromantic, Jes is on the run from a sadistic researcher who has tortured him in the name of science. And yet just as Jes starts to find love and acceptance in the circus, he confronts a new nemesis: a blackmailing crime boss who seeks to exploit his psionic abilities. Writing an asexual character “was liberating,” Wong says. “I myself have come to realize my own identity as being on the asexual spectrum later in life. When I was younger, I didn't have the vocabulary. And certainly there was no Internet to find community about it growing up. ... But I always found myself kind of uncomfortable in hypersexualized spaces and never really understood why.” “Also, I was fascinated by the idea of an asexual empath in a hypersexualized location like a pleasure moon. A lot of people are there to party and to get laid and to indulge their kinks and whatever. The book doesn't go super into explicit detail on that front—it's not erotica. But I was fascinated by a character who had empathic abilities, who could sense these feelings from other people but didn't really experience them naturally himself.” As an internationally known hula hoop teacher and performer, Khan Wong has toured with a circus, taught workshops all over the world, and produced circus arts shows in San Francisco. He’s worked in the nonprofit arts for many years, most recently as an arts funder for a public sector grantmaking agency. The Circus Infinite is his first novel. Rob Wolf is a writer and co-host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Saronik talks with Manish Melwani about outdated visions of the future and stale science fiction ideas that just won’t die. Manish is a Singaporean writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2014, and then completed a master’s thesis at NYU entitled Starports, Portals and Port Cities: Science Fiction and Fantasy in Empire’s Wake. (That’s where he met Saronik.) Manish has published several short stories, with several more—and a novel—on the way. They talk about science fiction’s imperialist heritage and how going to Mars is just a distraction from the imaginative (and literal) dead end our civilization faces. They also throw shade on Cecil Rhodes and certain tech moguls who have completely missed the point of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Manish’s perspective has been shaped by many other writers and theorists including: John Rieder’s work on Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Samuel R. Delany’s seminal essays, Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding, a group biography of John W. Campbell and other figures from the Golden Age of science fiction, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent climate sci-fi oeuvre. Further reading includes Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle, Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers edited by Sarena Ulibarri, and Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland. Image created by Saronik Bosu using open source vectors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes—heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies—into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go. Chi Ta-wei is a renowned writer and scholar from Taiwan. Chi’s scholarly work focuses on LGBT studies, disability studies, and Sinophone literary history, while his award-winning creative writing ranges from science fiction to queer short stories. He is an associate professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University. Ari Larissa Heinrich is a professor of Chinese literature and media at the Australian National University. They are the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (2018) and other books, and the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s novel Last Words from Montmartre (2014).
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Take an average-to-below-average man, his loyal best friend, a jar of pickles, and some bug sex facts, and what do you have? The answer to that is Stringers, the new novel by Chris Panatier (Angry Robot, April 2022), which is already garnering fantastic reviews. In this riotous, laugh-out-loud science fiction epic, Ben Sullivan has lived a life full of questions relating to the strange facts in his brain and now faces abduction by aliens who want the answers he doesn’t have. It’s part buddy movie, part space adventure, with lots of heart and charm. It’s also ridiculously funny. “I wasn’t thinking about a space comedy even when I first conceived of [STRINGERS],” Chris says. “What I first conceived of was ‘what if someone was born with a bunch of crazy knowledge in their head’. Of course, because of my affinity for potty humour, that went to bugs f***ing themselves in the head, which you’ll find on page 3.” From its stunning cover to the formatting quirks that make it unlike anything you’ve read before—plus, yes, those bug facts—Stringers is sure to delight fans who enjoy Hitchhiker’s Guide and Red Dwarf and who might be in need of a laugh-out-loud escape from reality. Chris Panatier lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, daughter, and a fluctuating herd of animals resembling dogs (one is almost certainly a goat). He writes short stories and novels, "plays" the drums, and draws album covers for metal bands. Plays himself on twitter @chrisjpanatier. Dan Hanks is the co-host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire and Swashbucklers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we don't understand. Depending the news of the day, we inhabit either a technological utopia or Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge surveys the uses of science fiction. Sherryl Vint's Science Fiction (MIT Press, 2021)focuses on what is at the core of all definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities might flow from such otherness. Frances Sacks is a journalist and graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. She is also a drummer who has studied Gamelan in Bali, Berber in Morocco, and most traditional Ga patterns with master drummers in Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). He brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. His other work includes two books of short stories (Third Class Superhero 2006 and Sorry Please Thank You in 2012) and some episodes of Westworld, He speaks with John and with Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine, noted SF scholar. The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the "small feelings" that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie's time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is "acute impostor syndrome" and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called "double consciousness." In conclusion, we followed the old ND custom of asking Charlie about treats that sustain him while writing. Later, we reached out with this season's question about what new talent he'd love to acquire miraculously. He had a lightning-fast response: "the ability to stop myself from saying a thing I already know I will regret. I would use this on a daily, if not hourly, basis." Mentioned:
Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
W. E. B. Du Bois on "double consciousness" (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Literature is full of families torn apart by tragedy—death, war, crime. But what if the members of a family can’t agree on the cause of the tragedy that divides them? In Mike Chen’s new novel, Light Years from Home: A Novel (Mira Books, 2022), sisters Kass and Evie agree that their brother Jacob vanished 15 years ago. But did he runaway to party to his heart’s content, as Kass believes, or was he abducted by aliens, as Evie thinks? Their starkly different interpretations of the facts exacerbates the pain and tragedy of their brother’s disappearance, pushing the family to the point of breaking. “One of the things that I really wanted to show was how a single moment can really change the trajectory of people's lives,” Chen says. Jacob’s disappearance “fundamentally changes the direction of this family. Kass has this attitude of ‘if no one else is going to fix it, I am going to fix it.’ And Evie has the same attitude, except she thinks about it as ‘I'm going to fix it by going with my dad on like these UFO hunts, and we're going to find my brother’ and their mom wants to just move forward because that's the only way that she knows how to do it. … They've all gone in a completely different angle because this disaster has happened to them and none of them know the truth.” Mike Chen, a three-time guest on the podcast, is the author of Here and Now and Then, A Beginning at the End, We Could be Heroes, and Star Wars: Brotherhood. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Today I talked to Sequoia Nagamatsu about his novel How High We Go in the Dark (William Morrow, 2022). In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects--a pig--develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet. From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resilience of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Tochi Onyebuchi’s new novel Goliath (Tordotcom, 2022) 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, who often leave behind comfortable lives in the suburbs, the gentrifiers in Goliath are returning from comfortable lives on space stations where those with means had fled years earlier to escape pollution and environmental degradation on Earth. Onyebuchi sees in the story of David and Jonathan—returnees from who take over a home in a Black and Brown community in New Haven—parallels to frontier narratives. “I've read a lot of westerns and western-inflected literature, and the ways in which people have written about the American West were very fundamental in how I approached the characters of David and Jonathan. You have people going out west historically for all sorts of reasons. ‘Oh, that's where my fortune is.’ Or they're like, ‘Oh, like, there are no rules out there. I can totally remake myself.’” In David and Jonathan’s case, their relationship is broken. “They think, ‘Oh, if we just change the scenery, that'll make things better, we'll be able to start over.… We can make this work on Earth. It's virgin territory, this place where we can build something together.’ That in many ways is the animating impulse, of course, completely or almost completely disregarding the fact that Earth is already home to a lot of people.” Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the Beasts Made of Night series; the War Girls series; and the non-fiction book (S)kinfolk. His novel Riot Baby—which he discussed on the podcast in 2020—was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Ignyte Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award. He has degrees from Yale, New York University, Columbia Law School, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
“Why not just torture this main character and make his children completely disappear?” That’s the terrifying premise behind Deep Dive (Angry Robot, 2022), the debut novel by author Ron Walters, which sets a videogame developer on a thrilling virtual reality adventure which is equal parts Inception and Matrix, and perhaps a little Parenthood too. Creating a story that is a relentlessly thrilling and page-turning science fiction story is one challenge. But Deep Dive also has a strong emotional core, that of a parent whose worst fear has come true. And so aside from nefarious government organizations doing shady things, we’re also treated to some modern parenting issues. Such as regrets over trying to figure out that all-important work-life balance—and what happens when you can’t and one side of it almost completely vanishes? This emotional pull within a fascinating VR-centric plot will undoubtedly resonate with all readers, but it will especially speak to those with children who face similar struggles. “A lot of people I know who read science fiction and fantasy are parents. It goes back to the whole idea of wanting to see yourself reflected in fiction. And so seeing parents ‘on page’ is hugely important—and nice when it happens.” Ron Walters is a former journalist, college registrar, and stay-at-home dad who writes science fiction and fantasy for all ages. A native of Savannah, GA, he currently lives in Germany with his wife, two daughters, and two rescue dogs. Dan Hanks is the co-host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire and Swashbucklers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Now that science has granted eternal life and youth to all, the world is a place of endless opportunity to live out one's dreams and fulfill one's desires. With death unnecessary, it becomes optional and suicide is celebrated when chosen. However the main character, 10,000 year old Warren, has fought off the urge to die but begins to contemplate making this choice for himself. Matthew C. Kruger's book What The Living Know: A Novel of Suicide and Philosophy (Nfb Publishing, 2020) tackles questions such as: How many times can you send someone on their way and not start to feel as if it might be your time to go? How much life will you live before you come to say "that's enough for me"? Or, through it all, will your love for life always endure? Our conversation discusses the importance of, not just having a philosophy, but having a lived and embodied philosophy: one that's procedural and takes into account the messiness and hardships of each and every day. While the book is a hard read mentally -- and perhaps spiritually -- it comes to the beautiful and paradoxical conclusion that there might not be a point to living but there's no point in dying either, that life is worth living, and that you should let yourself be moved and transformed through struggle. Not easy, certainly, but worthwhile. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely over-caffeinated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Most people believe that when they grow up, they need to “put away childish things”—a wise strategy for holding a job, paying the rent and raising a family. But what if you need to fight a malevolent pirate who threatens to destroy the universe? In that case, a toy War Wizard blaster might come in handy. In British author Dan Hanks’s second novel, Swashbucklers (Angry Robot, 2021), the four lead characters arm themselves with War Wizards and other toys retrofitted to inflict maximum damage as they try to stop an evil that threatens their town and the world. “The idea originally was to do a Ghostbusters thing, but then it became about ‘How would the Ghostbusters do their jobs as parents?’” Hanks says. “How would the Ghostbusters have dealt with fighting ghosts while also trying to find babysitters and go to nativity plays and things like that? What if the Goonies had all grown up and they had their own kids?” The story addresses the power and limits of nostalgia while remaining firmly rooted in the contemporary world, juxtaposing the surrealness of events like Brexit and the pandemic with the absurdity of a giant inflatable Santa Claus stomping on shoppers in the heart of Manchester. The heroes hail from a town based on Hanks’ home. “I used my local bookstore, the local café that is a big favorite of mine. I got everyone's permission before I threw them into the book,” Hanks says. “It's such a beautiful part of the world, and I kind of wanted to just trash it a bit with some supernatural crap. And I did.” Hanks lives in England’s Peak District. He is the author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire. He also writes screenplays and comics. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a period commonly referred to as the post-Mao cultural thaw, was a key transitional phase in the evolution of Chinese science fiction. This period served as a bridge between science-popularization science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s and New Wave Chinese science fiction from the 1990s into the twenty-first century. Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (University of Toronto Press, 2021) surveys the field of Chinese science fiction and its multimedia practice, analysing and assessing science fiction works by well-known writers such as Ye Yonglie, Zheng Wenguang, Tong Enzheng, and Xiao Jianheng, as well as the often-overlooked tech–science fiction writers of the post-Mao thaw. Exploring the socio-political and cultural dynamics of science-related Chinese literature during this period, Hua Li combines close readings of original Chinese literary texts with literary analysis informed by scholarship on science fiction as a genre, Chinese literary history, and media studies. Li argues that this science fiction of the post-Mao thaw began its rise as a type of government-backed literature, yet it often stirred up controversy and received pushback as a contentious and boundary-breaking genre. Topically structured and interdisciplinary in scope, Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw will appeal to both scholars and fans of science fiction. Hua Li is an associate professor at Montana State University. Clara Iwasaki is an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies department at the University of Alberta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Patricia A. Jackson’s debut novel Forging a Nightmare immerses the reader in a world of menace-—fallen angels and demigods whose history of alliances and resentments stretch to the beginning of time. Jackson puts a fresh spin on biblical characters like Gabriel and Lucifer by turning them into FBI agents, a parish priest, a homeless preacher and other seemingly ordinary folks who pursue ancient vendettas in modern day New York City. On the surface, the story is about a series of grisly murders. But underneath, it is about much more: a son grappling with his father's abandonment, the persecution of “the other” and the revelation that maybe Hell isn't the unremittingly evil place we thought it was. The hero is Michael Childs, a Black FBI agent who competes in jousts (at the opening of the book, he shows up at the scene of a grisly murder clad in medieval armor) and who (unbeknownst to him) descends from divinity. His sidekick is Anaba Raines, a Black former Marine and the eponymous Nightmare, whose transformation into a fierce and hellish horse makes her a formidable foe to angels seeking to do Michael harm. Like Childs, Jackson is an experienced equestrian. “I think every character is an extension of the author, and I am Michael Childs,” Jackson says. “I would go to horse shows and I would be in my boots and my breaches and my show jacket, and I would go to the mall or I would go to the bank, or I would go to the jewelry store dressed in my duds, sometimes with odor of horse upon me. And people would just kind of look around. And it wasn’t just because you were dressed in horse gear. You are a Black girl dressed in horse gear, and they had never seen that before.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The next world war is 13 years away—that is, if you live in the world envisioned by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War (Penguin, 2021). When writing about the intersection of combat and diplomacy, the co-authors draw from experience. Ackerman has worked in the White House and served five tours of duty as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. Stavridis, a retired United States Navy admiral, served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and, after leaving the Navy, as the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. 2034 plays out a what-if scenario, starting with an incident between the Chinese and U.S. that escalates into a major conflict. “You could certainly say right now, vis-a-vis the United States’ relationship with China, that if we’re not in a Cold War, we are at least in sort of the foothills of a Cold War,” Ackerman says. Told through the eyes of multiple main characters from five nations, the escalating conflict begins to seem inevitable as deceit, posturing, and a game of chicken made it harder and harder for the countries’ leaders to back down. Ackerman feels that a conflict between the U.S. and China in real life is possible but not inevitable. “It's a cautionary tale. There's still time to take the exit ramp,” he says. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Shmulie Shimmer is the inventor of LERBS, the most popular designer drug ever to be created. Turns out that it leaves people brain dead, and Shmulie should be in prison, but his business partner took the rap. Now Shmulie’s father hasn’t heard from him in over a year and half. He approaches Shmulie’s high school friend, Professor Nick Friedman, aka Nick Bones, private detective. Nick’s beautiful daughter was a victim of Lerbs, and Nick never wants to see the guy again, but Shmulie’s father has cancer and only a few months to live, so NIck takes the case. It’s a future in which the world no longer works the way it did, and sharp-witted, colorful characters roam above and below ground in what is an unrecognizable New York City. Now, Nick needs the help of his AI computer to make his way in the Velvet Underground, previously known as part of the subway system. Phil M. Cohen's Nick Bones Underground (Koehler Books, 2019) is a mystery, a wild ride through the future, a science-fiction nightmare, and an exploration of religion and humanity. Phil M. Cohen is a rabbi who has been engaged in Jewish storytelling for a very long time. In addition to a B.A from Dickinson College and rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Phil holds a Ph.D. in Jewish thought from Brandeis University and an MFA from Spalding University in Louisville. From his rabbinic education, he learned how to create and interpret stories. From his doctoral experience, he learned how to grapple with philosophical questions. In earning an MFA, he learned how to write fiction. From his work as a rabbi, he gained deep insight into the Jewish and broader world. And from realms unknown and a bit scary, Rabbi Doctor Cohen discovered his creative imagination. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Destroyer of Light (Tor Books, 2021) 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. Her new novel takes readers far into the future where humans are settling a new planet. They are the survivors of the world described in Elysium—an Earth where four-dimensional aliens known as the Krestge have destroyed human civilization. The frame of Destroyer of Light is a mystery—a search for a missing boy. But a deeper story follows the relationship of a mother and her young daughter, who is kidnapped and abused by a warlord building an army of child soldiers. The book is also about the relationship between humans and their former antagonists, the Krestge. Some of the aliens’ descendants now live peacefully among humans. While some people are willing to forgive the crimes of the past, going so far as to start families with the Krestge, others see the aliens’ crimes as unforgivable. “There's a lot of difficulty in answering questions as to what kind of people the Krestge are because to get to know one is not to get to know all. The first alien you meet in the beginning, the stepfather of the missing [human] boy, is really worried about his son and wants to do everything he can to try and find him,” Brissett says. “And yet I think the distrust that humanity has for the Krestge is not unfounded, and it's not without its history and not without its reason. The feeling of not being told the entire truth, of not owning up to past sins, to just sort of pretending that it all just went away because you've decided to not be that anymore, doesn't really happen.” Jennifer Marie Brissett is British-Jamaican American, born in London and raised in Cambridge, Mass. owned an independent bookstore called Indigo Café & Books. She obtained her master's in creative writing from the Stonecoast MFA Program and a bachelor's in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Boston University. Rob Wolf is a writer and host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Ryka Aoki’s new novel, Light from Uncommon Stars (Tor Books, 2021), is packed with as much variety as a box of lovingly prepared assorted donuts from your favorite, funky-but-long-standing neighborhood donut shop. One of the book’s primary settings is, in fact, a donut shop, but unlike other Los Angeles donut shops it is run by a family of refugees from a faraway galaxy. The story revolves around three women—the matriarch of the outer space family, Lan Tran; Shizuka Satomi, a world famous violin teacher, who is also contractually obliged to deliver souls to hell; and her newest student, Katrina Nguyen, a trans runaway fleeing an abusive home who has no formal violin training but is a brilliant musician with natural talent. With a book focused on musicians, Aoki relied on narration to convey the power of Katrina’s performances. “When one is a poet and writing novels, sometimes … I feel at a horrible disadvantage. I still write at the speed of a poet. … But during certain moments, I'm really glad I'm a poet because I know darn well that I can convey music through words. … I can use imagery. I can use analogy, but mostly I can vary my sentence structures. I can play with clauses. I can concatenate my grammar. I can write sentences so that one sentence jams into the next. I layer sentence fragments occasionally to build a collage of meaning. And these are all things that are poet tricks.” The themes of Light from Uncommon Stars are as varied as its cast. The books is about talent and genius, creativity and love, and the sacrifices—or deals with the devil—that some people may make to achieve success. Ryka Aoki is a poet, composer, and teacher. Her mixed collection Seasonal Velocities and poetry collection Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul were both finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards. And is also the author of the novel Hey Mele Ah Hilo. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Cadwell Turnbull appeared on New Books in Science Fiction two years ago to discuss his debut novel, The Lesson, about an alien invasion and colonization of Earth, centered around Turnbull's native U.S. Virgin Islands. He returns to talk about his second book, No Gods, No Monsters (Blackstone, 2021), which, rather than aliens from another planet, features monsters who live among us as our friends, neighbors and even relatives. While ostensibly about the fantastical, the novel is grounded in reality with complex characters whose experiences touch on difficult but important issues like police violence, othering, and even fake news. While the two books have different characters and storylines, Turnbull calls them “sister books.” Aliens and monsters “are both versions of human fears manifested through these speculative elements,” Turnbull says. “One is dealing with a threat from without, and one is dealing with a threat from within. And they both have similar thematic concerns.” Among the topics Turnbull discusses in the interview are the human propensity to deny uncomfortable truths; the challenge of those with different beliefs accepting the same version of reality (even when reality is captured on video); how monsters can provide a window on intersectional marginalization; and how writing can be like solving a puzzle. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
It’s no coincidence that one of the main characters in S. Qiouyi Lu’s In the Watchful City carries with ser a qíjìtáng, or cabinet of curiosities. Lu’s novella is, itself, a cabinet of unusual mementos, with many smaller objects carefully folded into the larger structure. On one level the plot is simple. The qíjìtáng is full of stories, and its owner, Vessel, who hovers between life and death, needs to add one more story to ser collection in order to have a second chance at life. (Vessel’s pronouns are se, ser and sers). So se asks Anima, one of eight people who provide surveillance for the city-state of Ora, for aer story. (Anima’s pronouns are ae, aer and aers). But Anima’s life isn’t so simple. Ae serves as a node in the city’s Hub, which aer monitors by entering the consciousness of animals (including a gecko, raven, and wild dog during the course of the story). In this way, Ae can travel anywhere and yet aer body is fastened by a stem to a tank of amniotic-like fluid. Lu likens Anima’s experience of being both fixed and all-knowing to our relationship with the internet. “We're sitting in front of a computer, and, physically, our body is stationed in front of this machine. But through this network, we're able to explore so much,” Lu says. “We’re able to go to faraway lands, see through the eyes of someone else.” The topics ae covers in aer New Books interview include aer inspirations for the novella (such as China’s facial recognition technology), aer interest in linguistics, including neopronouns, and aer fascination with experimental narratives. Lu is also a poet, editor, and translator and runs microverses, which publishes speculative flash fiction, poetry, and other short forms of storytelling. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Jackson Ford has some things in common with his protagonist, Teagan Frost. Both use nom de plumes. And both can move sht. With her telekinetic powers, Teagan can move inorganic objects while Ford (aka Rob Boffard) uses his creative powers to move plots at a rapid clip. Ford, and his publisher, Orbit, have also moved the cultural needle—specifically, by bringing three books with sht (asterisk and all) into the world. The most recent contribution, Eye of the Sh*t Storm (Orbit, 2021), is the third in Ford’sThe Frost Files series and continues Teagan’s attempts to learn about her origins while managing her government handlers and keeping Los Angeles safe from those with strange psychic powers like hers. “Teagan is not a typical superhero because she resents her ability to move things with her mind,” Ford says. “She would much rather learn how to cook, be a professional chef, and own her own restaurant… Her ability has forced her into a life she has no desire to be a part of.” In his New Books interview, Ford discusses (among other things) profanity, pseudonyms, and why Teagan, despite her extraordinary power, still needs the help of regular people. Born in South Africa, Ford splits his time between London and Vancouver. Under his real name, Rob Boffard, he is the author of the Outer Earth series and Adrift. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
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 on the other side but have no desire to explore beyond the wall. They are content with what they have, living comfortably with the resources, rules and hierarchies that have sustained them for centuries. But every couple generations, some people crave more. In this generation, a group calling themselves the Young Tarafians are determined to breach the wall once and for all. “It's not that there is some kind of very visible and wretched oppression that's keeping people down,” Bhatia says. “At the end of the day, the resources are distributed in a way that everyone has enough for at least a decent standard of life. So it's not meant to be a dystopia, and that's part of the point. … Rebellion need not only come from a situation of desperation … but you still may want to rebel and alter things.” When the troika of powers that rule Sumer—the civil government, the scientists and the religious elite—prosecute the Young Tarafians’ eloquent leader, a young queer woman named Mithila, each side has an opportunity to make their case. “It's actually taking a great risk by going beyond the wall. And for what? That makes the conflict between those who want to go beyond the wall and those who want to stay a much harder conflict to resolve,” says Bhatia, who is a lawyer and constitutional scholar. “Both sides have good arguments. It shouldn't be a very clear binary between who’s right or wrong.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
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 tools, created for specific time-limited purposes—to serve as a body double to draw fire from potential assassins, for example, or to provide donor organs. The question of a soul never enters into it. “Clones aren’t people. …They’re specimens,” Evelyn explains. “They’re temporary, and when they stop being useful, they become biomedical waste. They are disposable.” Evelyn’s attitudes evolve when her ex-husband, Nathan, secretly uses the Caldwell Method to create Martine—a new wife scaffolded from Evelyn’s DNA but modified to be more docile and easy going. Because of Martine’s compliant nature (and complete reliance on Nathan for her knowledge of the world), Martine is eager to provide Nathan with the child Evelyn never wanted. Evelyn is horrified by Martine’s existence—not only because Nathan stole her DNA to build a twin who lacks what Nathan calls Evelyn’s “needless venom,” but because Martine’s pregnancy should be impossible (clones are usually sterile) and threatens the future of the Caldwell Method. Clones’ “inability to produce children is something that Evelyn uses to help maintain a sense of them being inhuman,” Gailey says. “So Martine's pregnancy … poses a huge threat to all of Evelyn's work.” The pregnancy also poses a threat to Evelyn’s sense of self as she and Martine join forces to deal with multiple crises—murder and betrayal foremost among them—in addition to the pregnancy and Evelyn’s unexamined childhood traumas that contributed to her becoming a brilliant and fierce maverick. Gailey’s debut novella, River of Teeth, was a Hugo and Nebula award finalist. In 2018, they won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. They are the author of seven novels. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
A story about an alien invasion typically revolves around diplomacy, military strategy, technological one-upmanship, and brinksmanship. But the invaders in Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2021) are anything but typical. Rather than a scheming sentient enemy, Weir gives us Astrophage, an opponent who is mindless—and microscopic. Astrophage, which is similar in its biology to a mold, lives on—and taps energy from—the surface of stars. “It’s not intelligent in any way. It doesn’t care about us. But it gets to the point where there is so much of it on our sun that the sun is starting to lose luminance—it’s getting dimmer. And a four or five percent dimming of the sun would be fatal to life on Earth,” says Weir, who was a guest on New Books in Science Fiction in 2014 to talk about his runaway bestseller The Martian. An unlikely antagonist deserves an unlikely hero. Enter Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher, who long ago authored a scientific paper that declared water isn’t a prerequisite for life. This once-ridiculed thesis draws the attention of the woman mustering the worldwide response to Astrophage. Eventually, Ryland finds himself waking from a years-long coma without remembering how or why he got there 12 light years from Earth, where he must figure out how to cure our sun of its infection. While Astrophage is a deadly invader, another extraterrestrial plays a collaborative role. Thanks to the friendship that emerges between Ryland and Rocky, a hard-shelled, spider-like sentient creature with blood of mercury who breathes ammonia and hails from a planet with 29 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth, Project Hail Mary is as much a story about cross-cultural and cross-species exchange as it is a story of science, problem-solving and heroism. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden (Orbit, 2020) the multiverse is filled with parallel Earths where evolution takes different twists and turns. The forks in the road and the paths species take vary from Earth to Earth, seeding sentience in a wide variety of organisms. In one, giant mollusks “understand and communicate profound truths about the nature of existence.” In another, a creature twice the size of the average human with traits of fish, salamander and slug creates a permanent ice age and must upload its citizens to supercomputers to survive. Toddler-sized rats pave the planet with Industrial Age warrens in a different Earth. And in still another version of our planet, giant immortal spacefaring trilobites establish themselves at the top of the evolutionary heap for all eternity. Tchiakovsky’s characters learn about the existence of other Earths because the boundaries between them have sundered, necessitating urgent action. No single species has the smarts or technology to fix the problem by itself, so they must create an all-star team of the best and brightest among rats, trilobites, humans and more if any their worlds hopes to continue. While mankind’s dominance of Earth has often been mythologized as inevitable, The Doors of Eden presents a countervailing narrative, one that elevates chance as the most important factor in our species’ success. “One of the big things you run into in studies of evolution is this assumption that we are what it was all aimed towards when, of course, we're only one rung of the ladder that's going to run a long way beyond us,” Tchiakovsky says. “If the conditions had been slightly different, we would have been very different. … How other sentient races might have developed from a completely different starting point was very much the point of the book, to be honest. I needed to find a plot that humans could get involved in that would showcase all of those different earths.” Adrian Tchiakovsky is the author of over 20 novels and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction Awards. He lives in Leeds, England. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Space operas take readers far from Earth with stories about alien cultures and battles between good and evil. But while usually set in distant galaxies in the far flung future or past, they inevitably tell us, like any good science fiction, about our lives today. Ginger Smith’s debut The Rush's Edge (Angry Robot, 2020) takes place when humanity is spread across the galaxy and soldiers are born in labs, but it touches on subjects we grapple with now: blind loyalty to authority, the ethics of genetic science, and the prejudices that divide humans. Halvor Cullen is a VAT—a member of the genetically engineered Vanguard Assault Troops who are programmed to be loyal to their commander and addicted to the rush of battle. VATs are released from duty after seven years of service, but their bodies burn out quickly, and they die young. But it’s when they’re released from duty that things get interesting. How does a person programmed to be a soldier find purpose or meaningful relationships when they’re no longer a soldier? “VATs don’t get the chance to have a family or friends or the kinds of experiences we all take for granted,” Smith says. “Hal is learning a lot about what it means to be a human during this story. He knows about fighting but he doesn’t understand love, he doesn’t understand the difference between blind loyalty and the loyalty that people earn.” Smith wrote The Rush’s Edge in a response to a challenge from her husband. “I’d played around in fanfic, and my husband said, ‘you’ve got to write something original.’ I said, ‘Fine, I’ll write you a book.’” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
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 around it. Unlike the first three mythical birds, whose legends are hundreds or thousands of years old, the rain heron is a new entry in the library of imaginary beasts, introduced in the novel bearing its name by Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott. Set in an unnamed country beset by a military coup and climate disruptions, The Rain Heron (FSG Originals, 2021) is a story of survivors searching for peace but finding violence in both nature and society. The characters are tested and exposed by the titular creature, which exacts a price from those who dare covet it. “What I was really trying to do was create a mythical creature that embodies both the beauty and the savagery of nature,” Arnott says. “I wanted something that is totally captivating, the way many natural environments and phenomena can be, but also is really, really dangerous.” Arnott’s descriptions of nature are inspired by the beauty of his Australian home state of Tasmania, where he has spent long stretches hiking in the bush and fishing in the cold waters. “It always comes through in my writing a lot. There's lots of descriptions of natural places because that's generally where I've been and what I'm interested in. I tried living in a big city for a while and I just I just couldn't do it.” Robbie Arnott is the author of the novel Flames, which won the Margaret Scott Prize, was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Not the Booker Prize, and the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. In 2019, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. The Rain Heron was one of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Sometimes you come across a book that pulls you in from every angle. It offers you the space to explore your own fears and hopes all while taking you on a perilous adventure into the unknown with a character you feel you’ve met in real life. That’s a good novel, to me. That’s Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter: An Apocalyptic Thriller (Mira Books, 2020). In the novel, Wylodine is a marijuana farmer watching everyone she loves leave her small town. As climate change has devastated her world, she chooses to find her own way out of Appalachia. What she finds along the way is more than new faces to call family, more than new freedom and strength, despite the snow and hard earth, she finds a way to grow. Described as “Urgent and poignant, Road Out of Winter is a glimpse of an all-too-possible near future.” Listen in as Ali and I talk about Wylodine’s dystopia, our own pandemic-strained year, and the writerly life. And check out Appalachian singer-songwriter Liz Pahl’s song, “Wylodine,” inspired by the novel.
Ellee Achten is a writer and editor exploring issues of home, health, memory, and attachment. She writes everything from magazine features to lyrical memoir to sci-fi novels. She is currently working on many projects, including a collection of essays about the traumatic connection between the body and mind. She can be reached at: elleeachten@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The title of S. B. Divya’s debut novel, Machinehood (Gallery/Saga Press, 2021), 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 all intelligences—human and man-made—are given equal rights. The book opens with Welga, the story’s hero, ordering black coffee from a bot in Chennai, India; the bot puts milk in the coffee while insisting that the drink is still “black.” A human vendor across the street fills Welga’s order properly, without milk, and then summarizes her experiences with the two vendors in a tidy lesson: “Bots work faster, but human mind is smarter.” The vendor’s words foreshadow the fault line that runs through the book. On the one hand, humans rely on bots to run their homes and economy, on the other, humans compete with bots, constantly afraid of falling physically and mentally behind. “Once upon a time, we harnessed animals to help us,” Divya says. “Now we've turned to machines and, as those machines get increasingly intelligent, the competition in certain sectors is going to also ramp up. There's an existential fear right now for a lot of people that AIs are going to replace them and then they're not going to have work. So in part, this novel is exploring that particular concern, but not so much as a dystopia, more as a realistic vision … of what the future could look like when we have to coexist with these very, very capable machines.” Set 75 years in the future, the AIs in Welga’s world have not yet achieved sentience (hence they’re referred to as “weak” AIs.) Still, they are stronger and process information faster than humans. To keep up, humans use mechanized exoskeletons to make themselves stronger and pills to speed their thinking and reflexes, greying the distinction between humans and bots. “How much of a difference is there really between human beings, cyborgs and AI-based robots? And should we be making as much distinction between those categories as we do today, especially going forward as all of these things get more sophisticated? I was really interested in looking at the blurring of those lines and interrogating at what point we decide to give machines rights, especially when they provide us with so much free labor.” S.B. Divya was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards for her novella Runtime. She is co-editor of Escape Pod, with Mur Lafferty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
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 (Angry Robot, 2020)t, society is divided (as the title suggests) by something invisible to the naked eye: blood type. Universal donors—those with Type O negative—are the most valued. Universal recipients—those who are AB positive—are the least valued. With incomes based on the market value of their blood, universal donors end up at the top of the socio-economic hierarchy and universal recipients at the bottom. Meanwhile, those running the show—executives of the company Patriot—are the richest of all, living in exclusive enclaves. It is vampiric capitalism in more ways than one. The name of the company is a reference to the Patriot Act—a real-life example of creeping authoritarianism that parallels the world of The Phlebotomist (Angry Robot, 2020) “This ubiquitous contractor, Patriot, has slowly crept into the realm of individual rights and privacy until one day, everyone wakes up, and there's a mandatory blood draw, and they have to give blood every day and are under surveillance and tracked everywhere,” Panatier explains. “All of that started as a patriotic thing to do. There was a war, people were asked to give blood, and so they proudly did it. And then slowly … people were under the boot of the government and this enigmatic contractor. ... It's a bit of an allegory for sure. … because these are things I see in our everyday lives.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Arranged marriages have been around for centuries, and in The Light Years (Angry Robot, 2020), 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 several months later to find his 26-year-old bride, Hisako Sasaki, waiting for him. Because time dilation allows him to jump 26 years into the future, he can have his bride made-to-order, specifying what degrees and skills she’ll need to play a productive part in the family business. He can even require that she receive genetic modifications to make her a genius. Greene imagines that the same considerations that shaped arranged marriages in the past will shape them in the future. Hisako’s “parents are very poor. They’re refugees,” he explains. “Their only way to get out of this situation is to sign the contract. It's going to allow Adem and his family to pay for Hisako’s schooling, which she wouldn't otherwise have gotten. It’s going to pay for a family apartment, which they wouldn't otherwise have had. And it's going to make sure that she has a life that's going to be far better than her parents’.” Understandably, Hisako sees the situation differently. “If you're the mom and the dad, then you see [the arranged marriage] as something that would be good for your kid. If you’re the kid, your whole life has been stolen from you and preordained and pre-contracted. Like Hisako, you'd be a little pissed about it.” The Light Years is Greene’s first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The first chapter of Rebecca Roanhorse’s new novel, Black Sun (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020), features a mother and child sharing a tender moment that takes an unexpected turn, ending in violence. It’s a powerful beginning to a story whose characters struggle with the legacies of family expectations, historical trauma, and myth. These three strands are most powerfully manifest in Serapio, the child in the opening scene, who is raised to fulfill a legacy on the day of the convergence, a solar eclipse on the winter solstice. His sole purpose is to avenge a massacre of his mother’s clan, drawing upon magic to carry out the mission. And yet he has never lived among his mother’s clan, nor was he alive when the massacre occurred, raising complex questions about duty, history, and how individuals find meaning in their lives. “Serapio has always been on the outside,” Roanhorse says. “He feels like he has a purpose, a destiny tied up with something pretty dark, that he's doing on behalf of people that don't even know he exists.” Roanhorse explores “what that feels like and what your obligations are even to the point of putting aside your own needs to try to fulfill something that in the long run may not be the best thing for you, but you’ve been set on that path by others. How do you break free of that, if you can, and if you should? I think those are the sort of questions I'm trying to raise that I hope readers struggle with and think about.” Set in a fictional Mesoamerica and inspired by American indigenous and Polynesian cultures, Black Sun is the first book in a planned trilogy. Roanhorse appeared on New Books in Science Fiction in 2018 to talk about Trail of Lightning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020) is a sweeping novel about climate change and how people of the near future start to slow, stop and reverse it. The story opens with a devastating heat wave that kills thousands in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. From there, Kim Stanley Robinson pulls back to show us the world’s reaction, taking readers from the eponymous Ministry for the Future (which advocates for new laws and policies, like carbon quantitative easing) to scientists in Antarctica, where glaciologists pump out water from under glaciers to slow their slide into the ocean. The book’s kaleidoscope of viewpoints goes beyond humans to include animals, inanimate objects and abstract concepts, like caribou, a carbon atom and history. Robinson also uses multiple forms, from traditional first- and third-person narratives and eyewitness accounts, to meeting notes and history lessons, to riddles and dialogues. The effect is epic, conveying both the complexity of the problem and a wake-up call. “I want to make the very strong point that it's never game over,” Robinson says. “It’s never too late to start doing the right things.” And the right things add up. The novel spans 30 year, and over that time, the cumulative efforts of individuals, governments, scientists and even terrorists start to reverse the damage. “Especially for young people, I'm always trying to emphasize that it's not like we were having fun … in the carbon-burn years and now you've got to suffer and live like saints forever. It's actually that we were obese and hurting and stupid. And now you could be smart and stylish and clever and have more fun.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Over the last ten years, Paul Kingsnorth has become recognised as one of the most extraordinary of contemporary writers. After The Wake, which was listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, and its follow-up, Beast, Kingsnorth was hailed as "a furiously gifted writer," his prose suggesting "Beckett doing Beowulf." In his outstanding new novel, Alexandria, just published by Graywolf Press in the US and forthcoming in the UK from Faber, Kingsnorth completes his Buccmaster trilogy, conjuring our world one thousand years into its future, in which the last surviving humans come to terms with some very ancient fears - and hopes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (Redhook, 2020) begins with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time” but the novel is anything but a traditional fairytale. Yes, there are witches. But there are also suffragists. Yes, there are spells. But there are also women who fall in love with each other. While Harrow loves fairytales “because they give us this shared language,” she hates them for the limits they impose. Through her main characters, the Eastwood sisters, she turns the familiar archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone on their heads. “The Maiden-Mother-Crone triptych is something that I have always hated. It's pretty gross to define a woman's existence by her reproductive state at that moment,” Harrow says. “I wanted to be embodying and subverting it at the same time.” As the story unfolds, women’s demands to rediscover and use magic parallel their demands for political power and social freedom. In the guise of a fairytale, The Once and Future Witches explores the long afterlife of family trauma, the evils of demagoguery, and the blind spots of the American suffragists when it came to overcoming divisions of race and class. Harrow’s debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, was a finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. The Once and Future Witches is her second novel. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
P. Djèlí Clark’s new novella, Ring Shout (Tordotcom, 2020) is a fantasy built around an ugly moment in American history—the emergence of the second Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. The story follows three monster hunters: Maryse Boudreaux, who wields a magic sword; Chef, who had previously disguised herself as a man to serve with the Harlem Hellfighters during World War I; and Sadie, a sharpshooter who calls her Winchester rifle Winnie. The monsters are Ku Kluxes—member of the KKK who have transformed into huge, six-eyed, pointy-toothed, flesh-eating demons. The idea to turn hate-filled racists into larger-than-life demons came from Clark’s work as a historian. (In addition to an award-winning writer of speculative fiction, Clark is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.) When reading narratives of formerly enslaved individuals collected by the Federal Writers' Project, he’d been struck by the way they described the KKK. “They often talk about them … wearing simply a pillowcase, sometimes having bells on them, sometimes having horns or tails. And they speak of them as haints, that is as ghosts and spirits,” Clark says. Clark’s two careers—historian and fiction writer—have grown side by side (his first major publication, A Dead Djinn in Cairo, was published the day he defended his PhD.) While he has tried to keep the careers separate (by writing under a pen name), Clark believes they complement each other. Fiction can help restore stories lost to history, he says. “Finding the voices of enslaved people, finding out what they thought is very difficult. There weren't a lot of people going around asking them what they thought during that time. And so what you have to do, for instance, if you're trying to understand an enslaved person, you might read a lot of court records or you might try to read what their owners thought and then you have to speculate and piece together that enslaved person's life.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (Viking, 2020), residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits. The rabbits make fine citizens—more than fine, in fact. They in live harmony with the environment (embracing sustainable practices like veganism, for instance). They have a strong sense of social responsibility. They’re also smart: The average rabbit IQ is about 20 percent higher than the average human IQ. Yet despite their upstanding qualities, the haters keep hating. Fforde is an accomplished satirist and uses humor to spotlight some of our ugliest impulses, including racism and xenophobia. In The Constant Rabbit, a populist party known as TwoLegsGood has parlayed leporiphobia (fear of rabbits) into a successful political movement. In control of the government, TwoLegsGood is planning to segregate the nation’s more than 1 million rabbits in a “MegaWarren” where they will be under round-the-clock surveillance and their freedoms curtailed. TwoLegsGood’s treatment of rabbit has echoes of all caste-based and hate-filled societies, from Jim Crow to apartheid to the Nazis. “When it comes to the sort of demonizing of the minority other, there's just so much to draw on. You don't need to go to any specific place in the world or a specific time. You can just pick and choose from here, there and everywhere,” Fforde says. “The rabbits are being got rid of because they're not human. But, of course, one of the first things that any discriminatory group will do against another group of humans will be to dehumanize them, to make them non-human. And this is often done through language. We had a politician recently in the in the U.K. who started referring to immigrants a plague.” The novel’s first-person human protagonist, Peter Knox, denies having animus toward rabbits—in fact, he finds himself falling in love with one—and yet he’s forced to come to terms with the fact that he, too, has played a significant role in their oppression. “I think the book is hoping to say to people, ‘Look, you cannot look at the hate groups and say “These people are the hate groups. I'm nothing like them.” In fact, perhaps what you should be thinking is “Maybe I am complicit, and in what ways could I possibly be so?” ’ Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (Harper, 2020) 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 week) reaching the final round of the prestigious Booker Prize. Although Cook has lived mostly in cities, she loves spending time in nature and wrote some of The New Wilderness while trekking across the high desert of Oregon. “There is something about the expansiveness of lands that are empty that make my imagination feel a lot freer than it usually does in a city,” she says. For Cook’s protagonist Bea, the Wilderness State offers the only hope for saving the life of her 5-year-old daughter, Agnes. But as Agnes’ lungs heal from the city’s smog, her relationship with her mother grows strained, suffering rifts that might be typical for a mother and daughter but are magnified by the strain of having to invent a nomadic way of life in a remorseless expanse. “The Wilderness State is this very extreme place and this very extreme situation so it pushes everyone to a very extreme version of how they would normally be,” Cook says. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the illusion of reality, Blade Runner and android emotion, and more. A heady mix of science fiction, neuroscience, and philosophy, NeuroScience Fiction takes us from Vanilla Sky to neural research labs, and from Planet of the Apes to what makes us human. The end result is a sort of bio-technological “Sophie’s World for the 21st Century”, and a compelling update on the state of human knowledge through its cultural expressions in film and art. Dr. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is the director of the Centre for Systems Neuroscience and the Head of Bioengineering at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on the principles of visual perception and memory, and is credited with the discovery of "Concept cells" or "Jennifer Aniston neurons" - neurons in the human brain that play a key role in memory formation. Dr. John Griffiths (@neurodidact) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, and Head of Whole Brain Modelling at the CAMH Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. His research group (www.grifflab.com) works at the intersection of computational neuroscience and neuroimaging, building simulations of human brain activity aimed at improving the understanding and treatment of neuropsychiatric and neurological illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
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 says. 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.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Premee Mohamed’s debut novel, Beneath the Rising (Solaris, 2020) came out in March, but don’t call her a new writer. “I find it funny that people refer to people who have just started to get published as new writers. I finished my first novel when I was 12. I'm not a new writer. What I am is new to publishing, and it's so weird to me that people conflate the two, as if you just started writing at the moment you started getting published,” Mohamed says. She’d completed the first draft of Beneath the Rising in 2002, around the time she’d received her undergraduate degree in molecular genetics, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she decided to try and publish it. Until then, writing was “very much my private little hobby.” Beneath the Rising combines horror, science fiction and fantasy in its portrayal of the complicated friendship of Nick and Joanna (Johnny). They’d been close since they were young children despite many differences (she’s a rich, white, world-famous scientist; he’s a poor, brown, ordinary guy). But their relationship gets tested when Johnny’s latest invention—a clean reactor the size of a shoebox—unleashes Lovecraftian monsters, and, in the process of helping Johnny battle this cosmic evil, Nick uncovers secrets that change his view of Johnny. The monsters pose the ultimate foil for Johnny, who, like many scientists, wants to both understand the world and control it. “As a scientist,” Mohamed explains, “she wants [the monsters] to be understandable, to be comprehensible. And, of course, they can't be reduced down to something you can study in the lab and that just drives her berserk.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Few science fiction writers have their vision of the future tested upon publication. But that’s what happened to Ilze Hugo, whose novel about a mysterious epidemic, The Down Days (Skybound Books, 2020), debuted in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. “For it to be published right in the middle of all this is the most surreal experience,” Hugo says. Many of the book’s details are spot on: masks, online funerals, elbow bumps in lieu of handshakes. But the South African writer is frustrated that she missed a few nuances like “the way that your glasses fog up when you're wearing a mask … or the fact that you get acne.” “Something that you can't really understand until you’ve experienced it is how at the beginning of [the Covid-19 pandemic], everyone was taking it fairly seriously, and they were quarantining and self-isolating. Now if you go to the shop, you have people acting as if we're not in a pandemic at all. It's as if people can only emotionally stress about it or think about it for a certain period of time and then they go back to their lives.” While contagious, the illness in The Down Days is unusual: people laugh themselves to death. As surreal as this sounds, Hugo was inspired by a real event—the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, which in 1962 reportedly affected nearly 1,000 individuals. Although the story doesn’t explicitly mention the devastating—and ongoing—impact of apartheid, Hugo says it’s woven into the fabric of the story. “I think every single South African novel ever written is about apartheid in some way even though it doesn't necessarily mention it because it's such a fresh issue for us that we are all constantly aware of it. Just the way that the characters interact with each other and through small comments, it's always on the surface.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby (Tor.com, 2020) tells the story of two siblings—Ella, who is gifted with powers of precognition and telekinesis, and her younger brother Kevin, whose exuberant resistance to systemic racism earns him a one-way ticket to jail. Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults is as much a tale of the siblings’ bond as it is a portrait of white supremacy, police brutality, and the anger of Black Americans at centuries of injustice. The book’s publication just months before the murder of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic might seem prescient, yet the novel could have been written at any point in the last several decades (or centuries) and still felt timely. Kev is born during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. A few years later, the police killing of Sean Bell leads Ella to run away from home, afraid that her anger, harnessed to the supernatural powers she can’t yet control, might cause her to hurt those she loves. “She's changed as a result of having seen [Sean Bell’s murder] in a way that I think a lot of people were changed when they saw footage of Laquan McDonald's death or Philando Castile’s, these immensely traumatic visual experiences,” Onyebuchi says. Onyebuchi rejects the notion that anger must be productive. “When I started writing Riot Baby, I was very angry, and I feel like one of the things that happens during these periods of American unrest, particularly along a racialized vector, is this idea of productivity, that the anger has to be productive,” he says. “And there was a part of me, a very large part of me, that was essentially ‘Screw that. I'm not here for respectability politics.’ Black people have been playing the respectability politics game since time immemorial. And in the history of modern America, what has it gotten us? And that was a lot of what powered the omnipresence of anger in the book, this idea that it doesn't have to be productive.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In his new book, Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television (Rutgers University Press, 2020), Brian Crim explores the diverse ways in which the Holocaust influences and shapes science fiction and horror film and television by focusing on notable contributions from the last fifty years. The supernatural and extraterrestrial are rich and complex spaces with which to examine important Holocaust themes - trauma, guilt, grief, ideological fervor and perversion, industrialized killing, and the dangerous afterlife of Nazism after World War II. Planet Auschwitz explores why the Holocaust continues to set the standard for horror in the modern era and asks if the Holocaust is imaginable here on Earth, at least by those who perpetrated it, why not in a galaxy far, far away? The pervasive use of Holocaust imagery and plotlines in horror and science fiction reflects both our preoccupation with its enduring trauma and our persistent need to “work through” its many legacies. Brian Crim is Professor of History at the University of Lynchburg in Viriginia. Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Velocity Weapon (Orbit, 2019) by Megan E. O’Keefe centers on siblings: Biran, a member of an elite cadre that controls the interstellar gates by which humans travel among star systems, and his sister, Sanda, a gunner who finds herself waking 230 years after her last battle on an empty, enemy spaceship, believing she’s the last human alive. O’Keefe’s characters search for truth in a universe where the secrets are centuries old and where A.I.s depend on humans as much as humans depend on A.I.s. Among the many themes O’Keefe’s space opera explores are the limits of human perception. In Sanda’s case, her reality is controlled by a spaceship. “They are elements of horror when you can’t trust the environment you live in, when the only thing keeping you alive might be dishonest,” O’Keefe says. O’Keefe challenges Tolstoy’s claim that “all happy families are alike” by giving Biran and Sanda an upbringing in their two-dad home that is as happy as it is unique. “I enjoy taking the opportunity to explore a family that is actually united—they have their squabbles, of course—but they love each other and are trying to do the right thing in an impossible situation.” Velocity Weapon, which was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award, is the first book in O’Keefe’s Protectorate trilogy. The second book, Chaos Vector, is scheduled for publication in July. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Laura Lam’s new book Goldilocks (Orbit, 2020) takes readers into space with an all-female crew bound for a distant Earth-like planet. The all-female crew isn’t the only twist; there’s also the fact that the five astronauts steal their spaceship. The crew aren’t mere bandits, but the spacecraft’s original crew, who’d been shoved aside by a reactionary patriarchy intent on confining women to home and family. “As a little girl, I thought sexism was on the way out. And in the last few years, I’ve realized, ‘Oh no, it’s definitely not,’” Lam says, discussing her motivations to write the book. When NASA confiscates the spacecraft of Valerie Black, a billionaire entrepreneur who Lam describes as a “cross between Elon Musk and Sigourney Weaver,” Black steals it back. She and her crew “know they’re the best people with the skills and training to find this new planet, which is humanity’s last hope because Earth has only 30 years left of habitability due to climate change,” Lam says. Lam found inspiration in the unsung women who’ve played a role in the history of spaceflight, including the Mercury 13, a group of women who’d passed the same physiological tests as the seven men of the Mercury project in the late 1950s. “The Mercury 13 really helped me focus the book. … There are all these women who have been influential in space flight, but we still haven’t had a woman on the Moon,” Lam says. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Tyler Hayes's The Imaginary Corpse (Angry Robot, 2019) offers an escape from the unending stress of the Covid-19 pandemic with three simple words: plush yellow triceratops. Nothing could be farther from our collective coronavirus nightmare than the Stillreal, where Hayes’ protagonist, Tippy (the aforementioned triceratops), runs the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency. Which is not to say that the book doesn’t have its own nightmares or traumas; they’re just softened by the fact that all the characters are imaginary friends created by people (“actual people, out there in the real world,” as Tippy explains) who are forced to abandon them after suffering a horrible trauma (domestic violence, child molestation, and fatal car accidents, to name a few). So even though Tippy is a cheery sunflower yellow, his nature is informed by a violent incident that led his creator, eight-year-old Sandra, to surrender him to the liminal world of the Stillreal. There, he solves crimes that happen to other imaginary friends, like his roommate (a disembodied hand), or the hotelier (a towering eagle in a stars-and-stripes apron) whose inn serves as a rest stop for new arrivals. The Imaginary Corpse is a mashup of fairytale, comic book, noir and science fiction, making it thoroughly unclassifiable. “I set out from the beginning knowing this was a book for adults,” Hayes says. And yet it’s a noir with fuzzy edges. “The choice to make the book kind was one of my biggest driving goals… This is a kinder world than a lot of fictional worlds, than often our world is. I stuck hard on that, on the idea of community, the idea of compassion, the idea of empathizing and accepting people where they are.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Ken Liu’s second collection of speculative stories explores migration, memory, and a post-human future through the eyes of parents and their children. Whether his characters are adjusting to life on a new planet or grappling with moral quandaries—like whether a consciousness uploaded to a server is still human—they struggle with the age-old task of forging identities that set them apart from the definitions and limits imposed by society, biology—or their parents. “We all have the experience of not wanting to be labeled, of being put into categories that we naturally feel a sense of resistance to,” Liu says. On the episode, he discusses several of the stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020) and talks about the art of translation and the role Liu has played in introducing English-speaking readers to some of today’s great Chinese science fiction writers. Liu was on New Books in Science Fiction in 2015 to discuss the first book in his epic fantasy trilogy The Dandelion Dynasty. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In Docile (Tor.com, 2020), the debut novel by K.M. Szpara, people pay off family debts by working as indentured personal assistants to the ultra-wealthy. Tor describes the book as a “science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power.” Szpara describes the book as "really gay." As it turns out, both descriptions are true. Szpara could have kept the story relatively simply by making Docile a tale of exploitation and rebellion, but he isn’t content to portray the wealthy Alex simply as an abusive patron who brainwashes his compliant docile, Elisha. Instead, their relationship is complicated by society’s efforts to make servitude more palatable by providing dociles with rights (like the right to adequate food and medical care, the right to vote, etc.) and a drug (which Elisha scandalously refuses) that helps dociles forget their suffering. Szpara also dares to have Alex and Elisha fall—or at least think they are falling—in love. This raises a host of questions. Who is Alex falling in love with—the real Elisha or the man he’s created through his harsh “training”? Does Elisha have the agency to love after being dominated and manipulated into becoming Alex’s perfect companion? “People say to Elisha ‘maybe you just like this kind of sex because it's the kind of sex you were taught to have. Maybe you just like Alex because he taught you to like him. Maybe you only like playing the piano, or these clothes because Alex gave them to you.’ And then he has to ask himself: ‘But they're the things that I like. Do I have to not like the things that I like because they were thrust upon me?’” Szpara continues: “So many things are thrust upon us by people, by capitalism, by people who are making decisions above us and handing them to us and telling us to like them. At a certain point you just say, ‘Oh hey, I like this, and I accept it. You know, I like this new song by Lady Gaga even though I hear it a thousand times a day, and that's probably why I like it, but I just do. I enjoy listening to it.’ …We don't exist in worlds where we can always make pure and good decisions all the time.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
To catch the people who killed her environmentalist father, the main character of Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds (Tor Books, 2019) disappears into a virtual world of overlapping LARPs—live action role-playing games. But Sura Neelin soon discovers that the LARPs are more than games. They’re also an underground economy that meets players’ needs for food, shelter, services and everything else the non-virtual world also provides. Among the concepts she encounters is the idea that software can provide inanimate objects with self-sovereignty, allowing them to take charge of their own destinies. Sura discovers that self-sovereignty can apply to things like a river or a forest, giving them the ability to advocate for their own health and well-being—essentially putting them on an equal footing with humans who might try to exploit them. For Schroeder, who is both a writer and professional futurist, science fiction can be both entertainment and a laboratory to explore ideas like self-sovereignty. He’s been hired by governments and companies to write fictional scenarios to test the implications of new concepts and technologies. “What stories allow you to do is bring together immense numbers of different ideas and get them all spinning and interacting at the same time without people losing track of what’s going on,” he says in his New Books interview. “You can pile immense amounts of complexity into a narrative and people will understand it intuitively and seamlessly in a way that they will not understand a 400-page report.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
When Nino Cipri entered the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, they had no expectation of winning, so when they won, they were shocked. The prize came with a publishing contract, and suddenly Cipri was scrambling for a literary agent, negotiating a contract, and reaching a wider audience. “I wasn't really planning on writing a short story collection for probably another decade,” Cipri says. “I don't have the kind of output that a lot of other short story writers do. I was publishing maybe one or two stories a year.” Cipri’s modestly belies the maturity of their writing. The stories in Homesick: Stories (Dzanc Books, 2019) combines science fiction and horror to create complex tales about everything from ghosts and alien seedpods to difficult mothers and falling in love. Structurally, the stories vary. In addition to using third-person narration, there’s a story built on letters, a multiple-choice quiz, and a transcript of a series of recordings. What all the stories have in common is an interest in the meaning of home, and the presence of queer and trans characters. “For me personally, as a trans person, I'm always thinking about what does home mean when I literally don't feel at home in my body, or didn't for a long time. I do now. And what does home mean for a lot of trans and queer people when home is not a safe place for us,” Cipri says. Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. They are a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop and earned their MFA in fiction from the University of Kansas in 2019. Homesick is their first book. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Some war stories emphasize heroism and a higher purpose; others emphasize brutality and disillusionment. The first kind of story got Dietz, the narrator of Kameron Hurley’s military science fiction novel The Light Brigade (Saga Press, 2019), to enlist in a war against aliens from Mars. The second is the story that emerges from their experience as they learn that truth—and reality itself—are two of the war’s biggest casualties. Hurley is the author of nine books. She has received numerous awards, including two Hugo Awards, a British Science Fiction Award, and a Locus Award. On this episode of New Books in Science Fiction, she discusses using a mathematician’s help to map her time-jumping plot, working with a hands-on literary agent, and making ends meet as a writer, among other things. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The end of the world is no excuse for eating French fries. That’s a lesson 7-year-old Sunny Donelly learns from her father, Rob, who tries to give her as normal a childhood as possible in the post-pandemic landscape of Mike Chen’s A Beginning at the End (MIRA, 2020). Trying to be a good dad, Rob showers Sunny with attention and gives her fatherly advice, telling her, for instance, that lying is bad and that French fries aren’t healthy. But there’s an all-important thing he hasn’t told her: that her mom is dead, the victim of an accident during the outbreak that killed billions. Rob isn’t the only one trying to outrun his past with a lie. The other main characters—Moira Gorman, a former pop star, and Krista Deal, an event planner—are also hiding secrets. Set six years after the pandemic, Chen’s second novel imbues a San Francisco that feels almost like our own with a haunting sense of loss. But while trauma hovers over his characters’ lives, resiliency, loyalty and love ultimately prevail. What if “something absolutely catastrophic happened and you try to pick up after that?” Chen says, explaining the question that inspired the book. “The story I wanted to tell was… what if infrastructure and all the things that we’ve come to rely on are still existent in some form, but 70 percent of the people in the world are just gone? What you’re left with is not a survival tale but a trauma tale.” Chen appeared on New Books in Science Fiction last year to discuss his first book, Here and Now and Then. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Science fiction and fantasy often feature characters who seek absolute control (over a kingdom, country, world, galaxy or universe), but few break down the secret to power as elegantly as Seanan McGuire in Middlegame (Tor.com, 2019), where her sibling protagonists subdue the forces of nature through the union of two fundamental arts: language and mathematics. McGuire sees elements of a “modern Frankenstein” in her novel about a brother and sister created by a ruthless alchemist. Instead of a hideous monster, her alchemist produces two brilliant siblings, whose rhyming names (Roger, a genius at languages, and Dodger, a math prodigy) belie their potential to control time and space. Life is easier for Roger, whose facility with words opens doors. Dodger, on the other hand, has had a harder time socializing; as a result, she is less trusting and keeps to herself. “Dodger is a math prodigy and a smart girl. And those are two things that tend to get you kicked in the teeth by the world over and over again,” McGuire says. Raised in separate homes, the siblings are at first unaware of each other. Middlegame is as much a story about their on-again off-again relationship as it is about the discovery of their power to manipulate time and their own alchemical origins. “It took me 10 years to write because I had to get good enough to write it first. The flow charts for Middlegame were kind of a nightmare in and of themselves,” McGuire says. Like Roger, McGuire (who also writes under the name Mira Grant) was a prodigy in English. She is also an all star among writers. The author of 36 books, she’s received numerous awards, including the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2010 and Nebula and Hugo awards in 2016 for best novella. She's twice won Hugo's for best fancast and in 2013 received a record five Hugo nominations. She says her prolific output is partly a result of a conscious choice. “If you’re somebody that wants to have more of a social life than I do or wants to have more of a family life than I do, you need to make different choices,” she says. “At this point I am functionally … an Olympic athlete. It's just that my sport is novel writing, so I'm in training every single day to be able to start and finish the next book in a timely fashion.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Famous Men Who Never Lived (Tin House, 2019) is set in two Brooklyns. In one, people ride in trams; in the other, they take subways. In one, the swastika is a symbol of luck; in the other, it signifies hate. In one, science fiction is literature; in the other, it’s considered mere genre. Helen (Hel) Nash, the main character in K Chess’s debut novel, comes from the other Brooklyn—the one with trams and innocuous swastikas. She is a refugee from a nuclear war, one of 156,000 Universally Displaced Persons who escape through an experimental gate from her timeline to ours. Like many refugees, she’s having a hard time adjusting. Not only has she lost friends and family—including her son, who she can never see again—but she faces a new world of unfamiliar laws, customs, and culture. It doesn’t help that most people in our timeline eye UDPs with mistrust. Hel’s and our world diverged around 1910. “It was fun to think about all the things that happened since nineteen hundred,” Chess says in her New Books interview. “For instance, light beer wasn’t invented until the 70s, so that might not exist in the other world. There are many things that could have gone very differently, both in large-scale world history and in small-scale inventions.” Instead of trying to assimilate, Hel becomes obsessed with establishing a museum to preserve her vanished timeline’s art and culture. She is fascinated—and frustrated—by the loss of the thinkers, artists and inventors who accomplished great things in her world but died prematurely in ours. “There was something especially poignant,” Hel thinks, “about knowing exactly what these men and women might have accomplished if only history had proceeded the way it ought to have.” In this episode, Chess discusses, among other things, why she doesn't like her book’s title, New York's resonance as a city of immigrants, human beings' attachment to the past, and how she built an alternate world through small but important details. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day (Berkley, 2019) explores how society changes following two plausible disasters: a surge in terrorism and a deadly epidemic. In the Before, people brush against each other in crowded cities, gather in stadiums to watch baseball games, and hang out in clubs to watch live music. In the After, curfews and bans on public gatherings give rise to mega-corporations that allow people to work, study, shop, and socialize in virtual reality. The two eras come to life through the stories of Pinsker’s main characters: singer-songwriter Luce Cannon, who misses the Before, and Rosemary Laws, who comes of age in the After. The two collide when Rosemary starts recruiting musicians for StageHoloLive, a virtual reality entertainment company. In the After, most musicians would be thrilled to have Rosemary offer them an exclusive contract. But Luce is different. She would rather perform before a small flesh-and-blood audience (even if it’s illegal) than be turned into a holograph projected into millions of headsets. “Having two characters with vastly different worldviews is a great way to get some interesting conflict,” Pinsker says. A prolific short story writer, Pinsker has won Nebula and Sturgeon awards for novelettes. She is also a singer-songwriter, which helps explain the vividness of her portrayal of dedicated musicians like Luce. A Song for a New Day is her first novel. (A special thank you to Sarah Pinsker for allowing us to close the episode with an excerpt from her song Waterwings.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Ah, science fiction: Aliens? Absolutely. Robots? Of course. But why are there so many priests in space? As Jim Clarke writes in Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy (Gylphi, 2019), science fiction has had an obsession with Roman Catholicism for over a century. The religion is the genre’s dark twin as well as its dirty secret. In this first ever study of the relationship between Catholicism and science fiction, Jim Clarke explores the genre's co-dependence and antagonism with the largest sect of Christianity. Tracking its origins all the way back to the pamphlet wars of the Enlightenment and speculative fiction's Gothic origins, Clarke unveils a story of robot Popes, Jesuit missions to the stars, first contact between aliens and the Inquisition, and rewritings of the Reformation. Featuring close readings of over fifty SF texts, he examines how the genre’s greatest invention might just be the imaginary Catholicism it repeatedly and obsessively depicts, a faux Catholicism at odds with the religion's own intriguing interest in both science and the possibility of alien life. Jim Clarke is Senior Lecturer and Course Director of English and Journalism at Coventry University, where he lectures on Science Fiction and Fantasy literature. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess, and has written extensively on JG Ballard, Doctor Who, and Iain M Banks. He is principal investigator on the “Ponying the Slovos” project, which investigates invented languages in translation. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In science fiction, “near future” usually refers to settings that are a few years to a few decades off. But Craig DiLouie’s Our War (Orbit, 2019)—about a second U.S. civil war that starts after the president is impeached and convicted but refuses to step down—feels as if it might be only weeks away. Born in the U.S., DiLouie now lives in Calgary, Alberta. He is the author 18 books of science fiction, fantasy, horror and thrillers. Our War came out in August, a month before the U.S. House of Representatives launched its impeachment inquiry. When he started writing in 2017, “I was looking at the growing polarization in America and political tribalization, which is considered one of the five precursors to civil war,” DiLouie says. “I hope it stays in fiction.” The story is told through the eyes of a young brother and sister who are used as soldiers by opposite sides. He set the book in Indianapolis because “it's a quintessential American city… a very blue city in a sea of red, rural areas.” He says he strove to be even-handed, focusing less on politics and more on the human impact of civil war. “At any given time, there's hundreds of thousands of [children] fighting around the world,” says DiLouie, who read reports from the U.N. as part of his research into the psychology of child solders. A child soldier’s “loyalty is not based on an ideology… They end up staying and fighting because the militia becomes their family.” While the conflict in the book eventually ends, DiLouie makes clear that the children’s scars—physical and psychic—will last a lifetime. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
While all fiction writers can pull characters from their imaginations and commit them to the page, most readers can’t do what Charley Sutherland can: pull characters from the page and commit them to the real world. Sutherland’s fantastical ability is at the center of H.G. Parry’s debut novel The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (Redhook, 2019). It is both a mystery (Sutherland and his brother must find and stop a stranger who shares Sutherland’s ability but is using it for nefarious ends) as well as a celebration of literary criticism. While the ability to bring characters to literal life might seem like a wonderful talent, it's been a problem for Sutherland. Ever since he was little, he has tried—with the encouragement of his family—to suppress the urge. “There's a long tradition of characters with magical abilities who are being told to keep it hidden and to stay normal, and it comes from the fact that a lot of people grow up feeling like what makes them special is something that's weird or strange, and they try and keep it in,” Parry says. “The other side of it, though, is that books are incredibly powerful and there's a real danger to stories and storytelling. When you bring something into the world, it's got the power to do extraordinary things, the power to save the world or to harm it. And there's a real responsibility that comes with reading, interpreting and storytelling.” Like Sutherland, Parry has a Ph.D. in English literature (her research focused on children’s fantasy, his on Charles Dickens). She lives in Wellington, New Zealand (where the The Unlikely Escape is set) and teaches English literature, film, and media studies. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
After writing more than 30 books, including memoirs, military science fiction, alternate histories, and a book of writing advice, John Birmingham was ready to try his hand at the sweeping and dramatic science fiction subgenre known as space opera. But you’d never know The Cruel Stars(Del Rey, 2019) is his first attempt at epic, interstellar, battle-of-the-ages storytelling. His deft hand has produced a tightly paced, suspenseful, and bitingly funny adventure full of wild military tech, high-stakes conflict, and five eloquent characters. “I'm a huge fan of the [space opera] genre, but it took me a while to get the confidence to write my own,” Birmingham says. The conflict at the core of The Cruel Stars pits the Sturm—who believe with Nazi-like conviction in keeping humans “pure,” i.e. free of genetic or technological enhancements—against the rest of humanity. “I very much based [the Sturm] on the ultra-right, which was coming to scary prominence as I was first putting this book together. But in a way, the system against which they set themselves isn't particularly pretty either.” Set in the far future, the story follows multiple protagonists: a scrappy lieutenant who suddenly finds herself commanding a powerful warship, a pre-pubescent princess on the run from the Sturm, a sharp-shooting pirate, a centuries-old, reclusive and foul-mouthed war hero, and a prisoner convicted of treason whose computer-generated soul is facing permanent “deletion.” Each character has a distinct voice and unique challenges. Princess Alessia, for example, transforms overnight from a coddled heir to an embattled leader while war hero Admiral Frazer McLennan must finally confront the guilt he feels for decisions he made hundreds of years ago when he last battled the Sturm. But the story’s center of gravity is Lucinda Hardy, the lieutenant-turned-commander. “Hers is the story I want to investigate most of all,” Birmingham says. “She grew up poor, and she finds herself moving through rarefied and powerful centers of society. Early on, one of the other characters tells her ‘You don't belong here.’ And the thing that she has to come to terms with over the course of her story is whether or not she does.” The Cruel Stars, which came out in August, is the first installment of a planned trilogy. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform.
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Amid a wave of time travel books published this year, Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline(Tor, 2019) stands out for its focus on a woman’s right to obtain a safe abortion. The book opens in an alternate America in which women gained the right to vote in the 1870s (rather than 1920), but abortion never became legal. “I was imagining that if women had gotten the vote earlier, there might have been a backlash, which would have prevented a reproductive rights movement from really taking hold,” Newitz says. In the novel, time travel has gone mainstream. Anyone with the proper training can do it, although technically it’s only supposed to be used for research. That doesn’t stop Tess, under the guise of studying cultural history, from trying to “edit” the timeline to thwart men’s rights activists from trying to subjugate women through their own illicit edits. And hidden within Tess’s agenda is another secret, which she hides even from her trusted friends. That secret is revealed slowly to the reader, through alternating chapters set in the 1990s in Irvine, California. For those chapters, Newitz draws on their own experiences, including being raised by an abusive father. While the father in the story is different from their own, “what’s true to my own experience is the emotional part of it,” Newitz says, adding that one of the ways “that fiction allows us to get distance on things that have happened to us is that we get to make shit up, and somehow, in the act of doing that, it’s healing.” The Future of Another Timeline is Newitz’s second novel. Their debut novel, Autonomous, which they discussed on the show last year, was nominated for Nebula and Locus awards, and won a Lambda Literary Award. They also co-host, with Charlie Jane Anders, the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, which won this year’s Hugo for best fancast. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform.
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In Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson (Blackstone Publishing, 2019), the U.S. Virgin Islands serve as Earth’s entry point for the Ynaa, beings from a far corner of the universe whose intentions and desires are as complex as the humans who come to loathe them. The Ynaa (pronounced EE-nah) claim to come in peace, but there are echoes of colonization in the way they manipulate humans with fear and violence. And just as attitudes toward European colonization are reflected in the use of words like “discover” versus “invade,” so too do Virgin Islanders debate whether the Ynaa violently “invaded” or more neutrally “arrived.” Humans are no match—either physically or technologically—for the Ynaa, yet that doesn’t stop some angry (and one might argue foolish) homo sapiens from trying to thwart them. Turnbull treats human and Ynaa with an even hand, offering cultural and psychological insights into the nature of toxic masculinity and the Ynaa’s bursts of extreme violence. Even though Turnbull is from the U.S. Virgin Islands, he initially avoided it as a setting for his fiction. But when a teacher in his MFA program “recommended to me quite nicely that I should write about my own experience,” he found himself crafting stories that eventually turned into The Lesson. “I guess it's inevitable that once I started writing about home, something clicked for me. I think that my giving myself the opportunity to have that conversation with the place where I was from allowed me to find my way into storytelling in a way that I feel is more meaningful. I think lot of the things that I was trying to explore in the novel—faith and sexuality and relationships and violence and toxic masculinity—all these things are things that I have had to explore within myself.” (Note: In the interview, we talk about Hurricane Dorian as if it were a relatively minor storm. The interview was conducted on August 28, the day Tropical Storm Dorian moved through the U.S. Virgin Islands and turned into a hurricane. The U.S. Virgin Islands were not substantially affected, but four days later, Hurricane Dorian turned into a devastating Category 5 storm that inflicted catastrophic damage on the Bahamas. --RW) Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform.
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C.A. Fletcher’s new novel, A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World(Orbit, 2019), takes place several generations after a pandemic has turned humans into an endangered species. For Griz, the adolescent narrator, life is bounded by his family, two dogs, and the Outer Hebrides island where they hunt, fish, and farm. When Brand, a lone sailor, shows up, Griz is mesmerized by his stories of adventure. But when Brand steals one of the family’s dogs, Griz gives chase. As Griz and their other dog journey through the ruins of our world, they explore the limits of loyalty while learning a lesson in human cruelty. “If you're not true to the things you love, what are you?” Fletcher says, quoting Griz. “That's when you stop being human.” In his interview, Fletcher discusses the research that informs the novel’s “soft apocalypse,” the difference between writing screenplays and novels, his father’s wise words about dogs, and the real-life terrier behind Griz’s canine companion. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform
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For Blue and Red—arch enemies at the center of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s epistolary novella, This is How You Lose the Time War (Gallery, 2019)—the only thing that endures after millennia of espionage and intrigue is love. El-Mohtar and Gladstone are themselves avid letter writers who favor fountain pens and G. Lalo stationery over pixels and Gmail. So it was only natural that when they decided to collaborate on a novella about enemies-turned-inamoratas, their tale takes the form of a correspondence. Since Blue and Red can travel across timelines and live for eons, they compose their letters from materials that take a long time to manipulate, such as the rings of a tree, an owl pellet, lava flows, and sumac seeds. El-Mohtar and Gladstone, on the other hand, were constrained by ordinary time and space. “He writes about four times as fast as I do. So it was it was tricky at first,” El-Mohtar says. “But then as we rounded off the first act, we started changing the pace of our respective writing. Max slowed down and I sped up. And then we were finishing at exactly the same time.” Like the co-authors, the book’s characters also found a rhythm. Blue and Red start our as sworn enemies sent across timelines to fight on behalf of very different futures. But they find that they have more in common with each other than they do with the universes that they’ve promised to defend. Red is “hungry for something more than what's known,” Gladstone says. “In Blue, she finds not just someone who takes the world as seriously as she does, but someone who has the same depth of desire and focus and devotion to her chosen art, which is time war … who throws her beyond her own limits.” “From both of their perspectives, there is a sense of alienation and insufficiency in the worlds that they come from,” El-Mohtar says. “Blue is someone who feels this constant gnawing, insatiable hunger that nothing in her world seems able to sate… until she starts being surprised by Red, this agent on the other side, who makes things hard for her.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. Follow him on Twitter @RobWolfBooks.
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In The Last Astronaut (Orbit, 2019), David Wellington turns his prolific imagination—which is more often associated with earthbound monsters like zombies, vampires, and werewolves—to the threat of an alien invasion. Set in 2055, the novel introduces a NASA ill equipped to respond to the arrival of a massive object from another star system. The agency no longer has an astronaut corps, so it turns to the last astronaut it trained, 56-year-old Sally Jansen, who retired in disgrace years earlier after the death of an astronaut under her command. Jansen and a crew of three, who are trained for space flight in just a few months, race to greet the massive 80-kilometer-long visitor, but the goal of each member of her team is as varied as their personalities. One wants to fulfill a life-long dream of being an astronaut; one wants to communicate with aliens; one wants to study them; and one wants to destroy them. Wellington says his interest in science fiction goes back to when he was six and he himself aspired to be an astronaut. “I wrote a letter to NASA saying, ‘Can you tell me what I should do to become an astronaut?’ And they sent me back a very nice form letter telling me I should enlist in the military and learn how to fly a plane,” he says. “They also sent me a manila envelope full of glossy 8-by-10 photographs of rocks on the moon and the Saturn 5 rocket and the Apollo lander and the Space Shuttle. Those photographs became some of my most prized possessions.” The alien object in The Last Astronaut was inspired by 'Oumuamua, which astronomers first observed in 2017 and had trouble classifying, first calling it an asteroid and now a comet. Because of its unusual trajectory and apparent interstellar origin, some even thought it could be an alien spaceship. “This is definitely a horror story,” Wellington says. “There's violence, there's death … This is not The Martian. In the Martian, Andy Weir creates a situation of peril, but it's all about solving that problem. My book is much more about surviving, if you can.” As for the all-important question of whether he’d rather dine with a monster or a space alien, Wellington is quick to answer. “I'd much rather have dinner with an alien,” he says. “I would love to try to communicate with a creature from another planet.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. You can follow him on Twitter @RobWolfBooks.
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The massive corporation at the center of Eliot Peper’s Analog trilogy, which he completed last month with the publication of Breach (47North, 2019) is radically different from most science fictional companies. It aspires to do good. The growth of Commonwealth into a benevolent behemoth is chronicled in the series’ first two novels, Bandwidth and Borderless (which Peper discussed on the New Books Network last fall.) By the end of Borderless, Commonwealth, which controls the near-future version of the internet, has become its own sovereign entity, one whose ownership of the “feed” has given it enough soft power to force nations—through a clause in its terms of service—to implement an international carbon tax. Breach opens 10 years later. By this point, Commonwealth has instituted open borders and replaced national currencies with “feed credits” (if that sounds implausible, see Facebook’s recently unveiled plans to create its own digital currency, Libra). Commonwealth is now considering implementing something that one of the company’s loudest critics, billionaire Lowell Harding, is willing to kill to prevent: progressive membership fees—essentially a wealth tax—that will charge users to access the feed in proportion to their net worth, with profits invested in infrastructure for the poor. Harding calls the plan “worse than the French Revolution” and “f**king Piketty on algorithmic steroids!” Peper brings back the characters from the first two books, giving a star turn to Emily Kim, a hacker turned MMA fighter who has gone into hiding after earlier misdeeds. Between suspenseful fight scenes, characters grapple with heady topics like economic inequality, corporate responsibility and national governance. There’s a message in Peper’s books for today’s internet giants. The companies “that have gained a lot of power in society,” Peper says, “need to look in the mirror and think about how they should actually be making decisions … that will actually result in a future that people want to live in for the long term not just for the next quarterly report.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter.
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Vandana Singh has made a career of studying both hard science and the far corners of creativity. It’s no surprise then that Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2018), which was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award, reflects a fluency in multiple languages—not just English and Hindi, but the idioms of both particle physics and fantastical narratives that reach far beyond what science can (as of yet, at least) describe. “One of the things that really bothers me about how we think about the world is that we split it up into all these different disciplines and fields that have impenetrable walls between them, and one of the reasons I love … writing science fiction is that it allows us to make those walls porous,” Singh says. A reader might think that an expert in both particle physics and climate science might hesitate to write stories that explore impossibilities like time travel or machines “that cannot exist because they violate the known laws of reality” (the subject of the collection’s eponymous tale). But Singh embraces paradox and the simple truth that there’s still much about the universe that we don’t understand. Scientists are supposed to be objective and “check their emotions at the door,” she says. But it “isn't that simple because, after all, the paradox is that we are a part of the universe, studying the universe. And so how can we claim full objectivity?” Singh feels the only way to be authentic is “to acknowledge who I am as a human, as this little splinter of the universe conversing with another little splinter of the universe.” Several of the stories’ characters are, like Singh, female scientists, and their struggles to be taken seriously reflect real-world conditions. “In the physical sciences, it's still pretty tough for women,” says Singh, an assistant professor of physics at Framingham State University. “We have plenty of gender issues in India but the assumption that women can't do as well or don’t have the ability … is not that strong or strident in India.” In the U.S., however, “the negative micro-messaging and sometimes macro-messaging I've come across has been ‘Well a woman, so what do you know?’ You’re automatically assumed to be more touchy-feely and … you must not be as good at science, which is utterly absurd.” For Singh, physics and storytelling are intrinsically linked. “The way that I think about physics is really influenced by the way I think about story, and they're different but they talk to each other,” she says. For instance, she’s used fiction “to explore concepts that help me also conceptualize climate science for the classroom and beyond, and think of or reframe different ways of thinking about climate change and what's happening to our world. … I guess one analogy I could make is binocular vision. I have two ways of seeing the world, and they talk to each other so you get more depth.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Khronos Chronicles. He worked for a decade as a journalist and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks.
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Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards (Europa Editions, 2018) uses a scientist’s relationship with bonobos—and her struggle to keep them alive following a civilization-shattering dust storm—to explore climate change, over-dependence on technology, and the challenge of a body that produces more pain than pleasure. The novel, which won this year’s Philip K. Dick Award and Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award from Dartmouth, was almost never written.. Despite the fact that her four previous books had been well received, Schulman found it a continual challenge to get published and was on the brink of abandoning writing altogether. But Kent Carroll, the editor at Europa Editions who oversaw the publication of her novel Three Weeks in December, reached out, saying he wanted to publish a new book by her. “I've always wanted to write—there's nothing more I've wanted—and so given the opportunity, I couldn't say no.” Schulman’s work returns again and again to a few themes. “I feel like every writer—if they're very lucky—figures out the themes that allow them to do their best writing. And I seem to have very, very narrow themes: some large, charismatic mega-fauna, a hint of possible violence, a different climate, some possible scientific research, and the main character has to be in a body that's somehow physically different from most other people.” The main character in Theory of Bastards, Frankie Burk, an evolutionary psychologist and recipient of a MacArthur genius award, has endometriosis, a painful condition that limits her activity and fuels her misanthropy. As the book opens, the 33-year-old Frankie is arriving at the Foundation, a zoo for primates where she can observe bonobos to research her hypothesis about infidelity—the eponymous “theory of bastards”—which postulates that the reason 10 percent of human children are produced through affairs (a number Schulman encountered while researching the book) is because the mothers have an impulse—regardless of the strictures against infidelity—to have sex with men whose genes will improve the child's immune function. “You have to wonder why there is such a huge percentage of children who are not related to their fathers,” says Schulman, who was raised by her father after her own mother had had an affair. “There has to be a big benefit because the dangers are so big for getting pregnant illegitimately, for having a bastard. And so the theory that my character comes up with is that that it offers genetic benefits.” The plot takes a sharp turn when a dust storm knocks out the power and information grid. To keep both themselves and the bonobos alive, Frankie and her colleague David Stotts, free the animals and lead them on an expedition across rural America, where the primates show that they might be better suited than humans to survive in what appears to be a post-technology world, and Frankie starts to shed her misanthropy, even as society is on the brink of collapse. “I've always loved post-apocalyptic novels, but it's almost always only able-bodied humans that survive. Nobody ever pulls their pet corgi out of the rubble and marches on. And I just thought it would be really interesting to play out what would happen if a relatively capable, somewhat-similar-to-human species survived with humans, post-apocalypse.” Schulman is working on a new novel featuring dolphins. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. You can follow him on Twitter @RobWolfBooks.
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Caitlin Starling’s debut The Luminous Dead (Harper Voyager, 2019) takes readers along with her young protagonist, Gyre Price, to a place few would voluntarily go—into a deep, pitch-dark cave inhabited by avalanche-inducing, rock-eating worms from which only one human being (among many) has emerged alive. Still, Gyre thinks the risk of scouting for minerals is worth it. Not only does the job pay extraordinarily well, but she’s wearing a state-of-the-art suit, which protects her from the cave’s potentially lethal environment. Normally, there’s a whole team of experts guiding cavers like Gyre, but when she’s deep underground Gyre learns her team consists of only one person—a woman name Em, whose motives and reliability become increasingly murky as the days pass. “The more that it is only Em there with her, the worse things get because Em isn’t sleeping, Gyre isn’t getting to talk to anybody else …, and they’re getting more and more drawn into each other’s problems as opposed to it being a professional sort of interaction,” Starling says. Gyre knows Em only by voice and an occasional video transmission, and yet they form a profoundly intimate—and arguably twisted—bond. It perhaps comes as no surprise that Starling was a teen in the 1990s, forming intense online relationships with people she never met in person. “It's very easy to construct ideas around who that person is and what your relationship is like that can become very tumultuous or intense,” she says. With a single setting and only two main characters, one of her biggest challenges was keeping the plot propulsive. Fortunately, with corpses of dead cavers appearing in unexpected places, massive worms threatening to bury her, and the ever-present possibility that rather than help Gyre, Em wants to kill her, Starling meets that challenge with page-turning ferocity. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. You can follow him on Twitter.
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In 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the Star Wars franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from near-certain extinction to the release of a new movie trilogy, two stand-alone films, and two animated series. In Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy(University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Dan Golding examines the current status of Star Wars, as well as the similarities and differences between the old and the new. His book is a great mix of both academic and popular that will give readers a useful sense of Lucas’ creation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Meg Elison’s The Book of Flora (47North, 2019) trilogy is as much about gender as it is about surviving the apocalypse. The first installment, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, set the tone with a pandemic that destroyed civilization, leaving behind 10 men for every woman. To avoid rape and enslavement in this male-dominated landscape, the eponymous midwife must present herself as a man to survive. In the next volume, The Books of Etta, set a century later, gender remains fraught but the rules have changed. The midwife’s legacy lives on in the town of Nowhere, where women are decision-makers and leaders. In this evolved world, Etta is allowed to choose the traditionally male job of raider, although she must still pretend to be a man to travel across a sparsely populated Midwest. Fortunately, this isn’t as heavy a lift for Etta as it had been for the midwife since Etta prefers to be called Eddie and identifies as male. The notion of choice is one that Elison takes a step further in the trilogy’s latest and final installment, The Book of Flora. Born male, Flora was neutered as a young boy by a slaver, and, as an adult, identifies as female. Although she doesn’t always find acceptance among the communities she encounters, she refuses to hide her gender identity even when traveling alone, preferring the risk of being female to hiding who she is. “As the world goes from absolute chaos to small pockets of … a more peaceful existence for women, I thought the most gendered person in the series, Flora, was the right person to come to something like peace,” Elison says. Set in a still dangerous world, The Book of Flora is nonetheless a riot of humanity, full of characters representing marginalized voices and communities incubating new cultures and norms. There’s even a hint of an evolutionary leap that may one day make gender obsolete. “I was really interested in books like Gulliver's Travels, but also in the idea of, after the loss of national media and immediate communications, how different our societies would immediately become: we'd have these little pockets of culture where every town would have its own urban legends and every town might have its own religion and every town might have its own courtship rituals. So that that gave me a real opportunity to get weird and I got really weird with it, and it was extremely fun.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from medicine to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. You can follow him on Twitter.
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Charlie Jane Anders’ The City in the Middle of the Night (Tor Books, 2019) is a coming of age story about Sophie, a young woman trying to forge her identity on a planet of rigid social classes, harsh climate and frightening aliens. Feeling hopelessly out of place, Sophie ventures where no human has gone before: into the half of the planet that's shrouded in perpetual night. There she befriends the native inhabitants, the Gelet; they’re fearsome tentacled creatures whom humans fear and hunt but who turn out to be sensitive, sentient, and able to communicate with Sophie through touch. Ultimately, Sophie comes to recognize that the Gelet “belong on this planet … in a way that humans don't,” Anders says. Anders, whose previous work has earned Hugo, Nebula, William H. Crawford, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus and Lambda Literary awards, is an advocate for the power of science fiction to help humans prepare for the future. “You can explore a lot of scenarios in science fiction that help people develop flexibility and hope and resilience and an awareness of the value of cooperation,” Anders says. Anders wrote The City in the Middle of the Night the old-fashioned way: in journals longhand. “I find it freeing in some ways because you can't go back and edit as much, and you just have to get stuff down. When you type it all up, that's the time when you start thinking about changing it, moving stuff around.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter.
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Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, 2019) takes us deep into the heart of an alien invasion that divides humans among those who welcome the extra-terrestrials and those who want to stop them. The book is the second in Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy. The first, Rosewater, earned the inaugural Nommo Award for Best Novel, Africa’s first-ever prize for speculative fiction. In most alien invasion stories, mankind and the invaders battle to the death. In Thompson’s tale, however, there is more inter- than intra-planetary conflict, with the insurrection in the title referring to the city of Rosewater’s rebellion against greater Nigeria. Meanwhile, the alien invaders have their own conflicts, with Wormwood—a powerful consciousness that reads minds and invades human bodies—battling for its survival against a fast-growing plant from its home planet. The book reflects a subtle grasp of war and politics with characters capable of eliciting a reader’s empathy even as they sometimes behave in less than admirable ways. “What someone told me this week about The Rosewater Insurrection was that they don’t know who to root for. To me that just means that I've been successful in showing the different points of view and the reasons for them doing what they're doing without bias,” Thompson says. There are hints of Thompson’s own life in the storytelling—as a working psychiatrist, as a Londoner of African heritage, as a student of history. The most powerful characters in The Rosewater Insurrection are women, reflecting his upbringing. “I had really strong sisters,” he says. “If you think about your average sub-Saharan African country now, you know there is lots of misogyny... However, the women actually hold the society up.” For Thompson, human nature is largely to blame for the civil war at the heart of his story. “They were dealing with something they don't understand, and the human tendency when they don’t understand something is to lash out one way or the other. … Any time when you get prolonged uncertainty with human beings, conflict is usually the outcome.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He has worked as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. Follow him on Twitter.
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Mike Chen’s debut novel Here and Now and Then (MIRA, 2019) is a portrait of patience. The main character, Kin Stewart, waits 18 years for his employer to retrieve him from an assignment. Then, after being rescued, he needs many months to re-acclimate to his old life. Those waits, however, are nothing compared to how long it takes him to re-connect with the daughter he is forced to abandon: more than 120 years. Stewart, of course, has no ordinary job. He’s an agent from the year 2142, employed by the Temporal Corruption Bureau to fix anomalies in the timeline. When his retrieval beacon breaks on assignment in the 1990s, he’s convinced he’ll be stranded forever. To make the best of a dire situation, he ignores his employer’s prohibition on having relationships in the past: he falls in love, gets married, has a daughter, and settles into a quiet life in the suburbs. Needless to say, it throws monkey wrench in his plans when the Temporal Corruption Bureau arrives in 2014 and compels him to return to 2142, where an entirely different life—including a fiancé who thinks he’s been gone only a few weeks—awaits. For Chen, time travel is a vehicle to explore topographies of loss and healing. Being ripped from first one time and then another, leaves both Kin and those around him despairing—until he discovers that 120 years is no obstacle to the love of a father trying to do anything to save his child. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He has worked as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Follow him on Twitter.
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James Rollins’ books are usually categorized as thrillers, but most of them could easily be labeled science fiction. An instant bestseller, his latest novel, Crucible, is no exception, revolving around the effort to control Eve, an artificial super-intelligence. On one side of the conflict is a secret sect, the Crucibulum. The spiritual descendents of the Spanish Inquisition, the members of the Crucibulum consider female scientists—like Eve’s inventor, Mara Silviera, a Portuguese graduate student—to be heretics and witches. On the other side is Sigma Force, a group of former soldiers working for the Defense Department’s research and development arm. This is Collins’ 14th novel featuring Sigma Force. When the Crucibulum steal Eve and order her to destroy Paris, the only way Sigma Force can hope to prevent disaster is by unleashing Eve’s equal: a second Eve. The two Eves represent the risks and rewards of the singularity, Rollins says. The bad Eve is a super-intelligence run amok, one who will do anything—including destroying its human inventors—in a fight to survive. The good Eve, who sides with Sigma Force, represents the hope that “the singularity will be a boon to mankind,” Rollins says. Collins concedes that genre categories are sometimes arbitrary. “When I wrote my first novel, Subterranean, I thought I was writing a science fiction novel,” he says. “My editor … said, ‘Hey, we’re going sell this as a modern-day thriller,’ and I said, ‘What about those telepathic marsupial creatures that live under Antarctica?’ and she said, ‘You set your story in modern times, and you have enough scientific basis for those telepathic marsupial creatures, so therefore we’re just going to pitch you as a thriller writer.’” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World (G.P. Putnam Son's, 2018) tells the story of Navy investigator Shannon Moss, who travels to the future to solve present-day crimes. The book opens with a brutal murder and a search for a missing girl, and maintains the pace of a chilling page-turner. But Sweterlitsch’s second novel is also an exploration of questions about consciousness, identity, and reality. The idea of using time travel to solve crimes emerged from a conversation the author had with his brother-in-law, a real-life special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “A lot of his investigations are essentially solved when a victim or someone who knows a criminal tells the investigators what happens and why, but if people don’t talk, the investigation becomes very difficult and sometimes impossible to solve,” Sweterlitsch says. “And so [my brother-in-law] was musing that if he could go forward in time, he could talk to a lot of the witnesses after the emotions had cooled, and they might be more willing to talk.” Sweterlitsch gives Moss the ability to jump forward in time, but any future she visits is only a possibility, one of an infinite number of options. That means the clues she collects aren’t hard-and-fast truths; at best, they are hints that may (or may not) allow her to solve the crime. In the present, such futures are referred to as “Inadmissible Future Trajectories,” since the evidence they generate can’t be used to prosecute a case. The only certainty, as far as Moss and her fellow time-traveling agents are concerned, is the present—or “terra firma,” as they call it. The notion that the present is “solid ground” remains a cornerstone of Moss’s beliefs even as the case of the missing girl grows more complex and Moss’s trips to the future start offering more question than answers. Sweterlitsch introduces a host of fascinating concepts, such as “echoes”—duplicates brought from Inadmissible Future Trajectories who already exist in terra firma. “Thin spaces” are dangerous places where slivers of different times and places intersect, and “lensing” is the idea that a future trajectory is always warped by a time traveler’s psyche, much as dreams are shaped by the unconscious. Sweterlitsch has found inspiration in everything from Dante’s Inferno to J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition to Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men.
In the Inferno, “the punishment for the heretics is that they can see far off into the future but can’t see the present … And that was the perfect literary precedent for what I was hoping to write about in this novel in terms of the mechanism of time travel, but it also put the idea of heresy and belief into the book,” Sweterlitsch says. “A lot of characters express beliefs about the nature of the universe, but in almost all cases, those beliefs are proved incorrect by the novel itself… Reality around them is very slippery.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks
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The Eurovision Song Contest has launched careers (think ABBA and Celine Dion), inspired outrageous costumes, and generated spinoffs. The campy competition also led a fan to dare author Catherynne M. Valente on Twitter to create a science fictional Eurovision, resulting in the publication of Space Opera (Saga Press, 2018) two years later. Shunning science fiction’s typical seriousness, Space Opera strives to be as ridiculous—and funny—as possible. “You can’t play ‘Eurovision in space’ straight,” Valente says, and proves her point by turning Eurovision’s 50 nations and 100 million viewers into a competition that extends across the universe, attracting billions of viewers and outrageous alien performers—everything from sentient viruses and talented wormholes, to creatures that look like red pandas—but can travel through time—or like Microsoft’s much-maligned animated office assistant Clippy. Space Opera’s intergalactic song contest was founded following the devastating Sentient Wars to promote amity among species (much as Eurovision was designed to promote understanding among nations—as well as promote the newfangled technology of TV—after two world wars). Speaking of Eurovision, Valente says: “I think it’s one of the more extraordinary things that humanity has ever pulled off to look back at those two world wars and say, ‘Hey, let’s sing it out.’” However, the stakes are a bit higher in Space Opera than in Eurovision since the contest at the heart of Valente’s story is designed to test whether humans (recently discovered by the rest of the universe) deserve to be welcomed into the community of sentient beings or, for the sake of the greater good, be obliterated from existence. In the end, the job of saving homo sapiens falls to a washed up one-hit former British glam rock band called Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros. Under the story’s playful surface are messages about diversity and the absurdity of one clan claiming innate superiority over others when random luck is the most important factor underlying a species’ survival and success. Space Opera became “a frothy glittery book about rock and roll and comedy that has at its core a dark political vein going through it,” Valente says. Valente is a fast writer (see her blog post “How to Write a Novel in 30 Days”) and was able to turn the Twitter dare into a manuscript in two and a half months. “If I take much longer, I start to hate myself and the book and don’t finish. I’m really always trying to outrace my own self-doubt. That’s why I write fast. It’s not because it’s fun.” Her agent worked even faster than she did. He “still calls it the fastest deal in publishing because within 24 hours [of the first tweet] we had a contract.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks
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The pandemic in Peng Shepherd’s debut novel, The Book of M, starts with magic—the disappearance of a man’s shadow. The occurrence, broadcast worldwide, is greeted with delight until more and more people lose their shadows. People start losing their memories as well—while gaining an ability to change the world with the power of their imaginations. As society collapses, the landscape becomes as beautiful as it is terrifying: deers have wings, clouds tinkle like bells, lakes appear overnight, flowers bloom in winter. The Book of M has garnered widespread praise, earning recommendations from The Today Show and USA Today, and making Amazon’s list of Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2018. A reviewer on Bustle called it a “post-apocalyptic masterpiece.” In a world of vanishing memories, Shepherd finds an unlikely hero: a patient with classic amnesia. Unlike the “shadowless”—who eventually forget everything, including how to speak or eat or breathe—the amnesiac never forgets how the world works. This allows him to explore, in a race against the seemingly unstoppable pandemic, ways to save the memories of the few who remain. For several of Shepherd’s characters, the worst thing that can happen to them is losing their connection to those they love. “Their greatest fear is the people they care about who’ve lost their shadows [will forget] their love and the memories they have together,” Shepherd says. The book is mum about the pandemic’s cause—as is Shepherd. “I sort of felt like if this really happened to all of us and the world was plunged into this kind of dream-like forgetting state, probably nobody would [know the cause] but everyone would have their theories. Some make more sense than others.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks
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Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (Delphinium Books, 2018) is set in a near-future Pakistan where a repressive patriarchy requires women to take multiple husbands and become full-time baby makers after wars and disease render women devastatingly scarce. A reviewer in the Los Angeles Times called it a “thrilling novel” with “exquisite” social commentary. Before She Sleeps was also among the books recently highlighted in an article in The Atlanticabout “The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia.” Before She Sleeps focuses on a group of women who’ve found a modicum of freedom by hiding underground with the assistance of powerful men, for whom they provide clandestine but non-sexual companionship. The book explores the boundaries of their freedom through an eastern and Islamic lens. “Western readers… are expecting some fantastic like Hunger Games-type scenario where the women come out as warriors and just smash the patriarchy. Feminism in my part of the world, in the Middle East and South Asia is a lot more subtle. We’re dealing with tremendous amounts of misogyny and … gender-based violence. So I think what women over the centuries have learned is not to directly confront that misogyny … but to subvert it, to go around it,” Shah says. The risks facing outspoken women in Pakistan today are real. Shah’s friend, Sabeen Mahmud, was murdered in 2015. Mahmud had founded a popular café-gallery and meeting space in Karachi that seeks to foster conversations about human rights, diversity, and other topics that are controversial in Pakistan. After the murder, Shah wrote with greater urgency, channeling all her “terrible feelings” over Mahmud’s assassination into the novel. While some might call Mahmud and Shah activists, Shah resists the label. “We feel like we’re just out there doing our work and saying what needs to be said and telling the truth about what we see in our lives around us and if that’s activism, then OK,” she says. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks
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Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding is the first comprehensive biography of John W. Campbell, who, as a writer and magazine editor, wielded enormous influence over the field of science fiction in the mid-20th century. “His interests, his obsessions, and his prejudices shaped what science fiction was going to be,” Nevala-Lee says. Many people are familiar with Campbell’s name because it’s on the award given out every year by the World Science Fiction Society—the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. (This year, the award went to Rebecca Roanhorse, who was on the podcast in September; other winners who’ve been on the show include Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, and Mur Lafferty.) From 1937 through the 1960s, Campbell used the magazine Astounding Science Fiction (now named Analog) to popularize science fiction and its potential to predict the future. But he also used the magazine to promote pseudosciences (like psionics and dianetics), and his legacy is tarnished by views that were “clearly racist.” “He was quite content to keep publishing stories by writers who looked like him... And the characters were almost all white,” Nevala-Lee says. “Campbell thought that maybe black writers weren’t interested in writing science fiction or they weren’t good at it. It never seems to have occurred to him that they might be more interested in writing for his magazine if they saw characters who looked like them.” Astounding is a powerful contribution to the history of science fiction, offering fascinating stories about the careers and personal lives of Campbell and his stable of talented and influential writers. But its immediate effect may be to spark a conversation about whether the best way to honor today’s emerging talent is with an award bearing the name of a man whose legacy is so problematic. A similar conversation occurred earlier this year over the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award; the debate ended when the American Library Association decided to change the name of the award. “That debate has not yet extended to the John W. Campbell Award. I think it's a legitimate discussion because Campbell’s opinions on race, in my opinion, are far more offensive than anything Wilder expressed," Nevala-Lee says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to be a bat, or a dog, a robot, a tree, a human being, a rock, a star, a neutrino? Discognition looks at a series of fascinating science fiction narratives – in some cases reading philosophical or scientific literature as speculative fiction – to raise important questions about consciousness and sentience and to help readers understand the significance of those questions for how we live with ourselves and each other. In addition to opening up some wonderfully thoughtful and provocative works of science fiction, the book also models a transdisciplinary mode of scholarship that is as inspiring as it is effective.
Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
It seems clear that our dependence on the internet will only grow in coming years, offering untold convenience. But how much control will we have to surrender to access this digital wonderland?
That’s one of the key questions animating the first two books in Eliot Peper’s action- and idea-packed Analog trilogy.
In the first book, Bandwidth, which came out in May, a single company called Commonwealth controls the digital feed for most of the world. To imagine its power, Peper says, picture all of today’s technology and internet giants “times a thousand.”
Despite its monopolistic control over the world’s information delivery system, it finds itself vulnerable to a clandestine group of hackers and psychologists, who, over many years, covertly and subtly manipulate the feeds of world leaders to influence their thinking about important policies, such as climate change.
“They’re not creating fake news,” Peper says. “They are actually sorting, ordering, and surfacing true facts about the world in a way that shapes someone’s opinion.”
In Bandwidth, the behemoth corporation finds itself at the mercy of wily hackers, but in the series’ second book, Borderless, (47North, 2018) published last month, Commonwealth gains the upper hand, using its massive influence to challenge the idea of a nation-state.
To Peper’s credit, things are never black and white. “I dig out sources of contradiction in day-to-day life and our relationship to technology and the world,” he says in his New Books interview.
Many readers might argue that the goals of the hackers in Bandwidth are good—such as forcing nations to respond to climate change. But these same readers would probably also agree that the hackers’ methods—secretly manipulating individuals’ feeds to change their opinions—violates ethical principles of privacy and autonomy.
The power of Peper’s books is that their world isn’t far from our own. The algorithms that animate Facebook and Google and (and Netflix and Amazon and on and on) are a bit like Peper’s hackers, subtly guiding our thoughts to give us what we think we want while also giving the tech companies what they want (likes, clicks, views, purchases).
The compromises we make with today’s internet seem to exact a low cost. But Peper wants us to stay on our toes. In the afterward to Bandwidth, he says people can remain autonomous by questioning their assumptions and remaining contemplative. “The feed,” he says, “can only define you if you let it.”
The third book in the series, Breach, is scheduled for publication in May.
Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga Press, 2017), John Crowley provides an account of human history through the eyes of a crow.
The story takes flight in the Iron Age, when the eponymous main character, Dar Oakley, is the first of his kind to encounter humans. He finds these upright beings (who hail from a realm that Dar Oakley calls “Ymr” in crow-speak) both fascinating and baffling.
Witnessing a battle for the first time, Dar Oakley can’t make sense of it. In his experience, animals kill for food, but absurdly people don’t eat their opponents. Rather, they defile and plunder their enemies’ bodies while tenderly attending to the corpses of their compatriots. (Any unburied remains are, of course, a windfall to hungry crows, who happily peck the bones clean).
Crowley calls the novel “a long meditation on death,” which makes the story sound more morose than it is. Dar Oakley is actually a charming companion, his wonder over human ideas about the soul and afterlife leavened by his kindness and humor. He makes several trips to the underworld (which changes over time to reflect evolving human beliefs) and even assists a clairvoyant after the American Civil War.
Dar Oakley’s long-life makes him a consummate storyteller, and towards the end of the book, his exploits—like his introducing the concept of names to crow culture in the pre-Christian era—are re-told as myth among modern crows. Thus Ka is also a novel about the power of words.
“If you’ve written 13 or 14 novels like I have, you cannot forget almost in every sentence that you are in a story,” Crowley says. And a good writer plays with that idea, leaving the reader poised between a belief that, on the one hand, what they’re reading “is just a story” and, on the other, that it’s reality.
Crowley, 75, has earned both the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.
“If you want to write a realistic novel it ought to contain a little bit of the fantastical and the spiritual and the impossible because life does,” Crowley says. “I don’t particularly care for books that don’t have something of that in it.”
Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future.
Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.
The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. The series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction.
It’s the first time Roush, who hosts the podcast Soonish and specializes in writing about science and technology, has edited fiction. “The mission of Twelve Tomorrows is to highlight stories that are totally plausible from an engineering point of view,” Roush says.
In “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafur explores how suspicion of new technology can have real life consequences. In this case, plotters against the reformist president of Nigeria try to muster support for a coup by manipulating fears about the president’s new artificial heart, claiming that the organ—which was grown in a Chinese laboratory from plant cells—is powered by witchcraft.
In “The Woman Who Destroyed Us,” SL Huang describes the plight of a mother who wants to exact revenge on a doctor who used deep brain stimulation to treat her son’s behavioral and mental health issues. The changes in her son are so dramatic that the mother feels she’s lost her child, and yet the son is happy with the result, feeling that the treatment has revealed his true self.
If there’s one message Roush hopes readers take from the collection, it’s that people are in the driver’s seat when it comes to building and using new technologies. He hopes the book reminds people “that we do have the power to adopt or shun technology, that we can decide how to bring it into our lives, to what extent we want to use it or not use it. We can even influence the way innovation happens. We can tell scientists and engineers, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough’ or ‘We’re worried about this. We want you to build in more safeguards.’… We have that power.”
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In Karin Tidbeck‘s Amatka (Vintage, 2017), words weave—and have the potential to shred—the fabric of reality.
Amatka was shortlisted for the Compton Crook and Locus Awards. A reviewer on NPR called it “a warped and chilling portrait of post-truth reality” while a Chicago Tribune reviewer called it “disturbing and provocative.”
The book’s title takes its name from a colony settled at an unspecified point in the past by pioneers. Life there is hard; not only is it always maddeningly cold, but a paucity of resources requires the colonists to recycle everything, including dead bodies, and they depend on mushrooms for all their nourishment.
But the most unusual feature of life in Amatka is that all objects must be labeled. According to the rules set forth by a secretive ruling committee, a pencil must be labeled “pencil.” A toothbrush must be labeled “toothbrush.” If a label wears off, or if something is mislabeled, the consequences are disastrous: the object degenerates into a primordial substance known as gloop.
Tidbeck says the novel began as a thought experiment. Essentially, she wondered, “What if we lived in a world where reality is controlled by language?” The idea was inspired, in part, by the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the structure of a language affects the speakers’ worldview. Thus, in Amatka, “Language has enormous power. You have to be extremely careful about what you say, what you do… because upsetting the order of things can literally mean the end of the world.”
To avoid the risk of things transforming into gloop, the colony Amatka (and therefore the book Amatka) doesn’t use homonyms, synonyms or metaphors—a principle adhered to not only in the original Swedish but in the English translation.
Amatka itself actually started as a poetry collection, but when Tidbeck couldn’t find a publisher, she turned the book into a narrative, a process that took six years. But Tidbeck hasn’t abandoned poetry entirely. As the plot unfolds, the main character, Vanja, is inspired by a book of poetry to rebel. Thus words serve as both the backbone of this cold authoritarian society and also offer—through poetry—a route to freedom.
Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe.
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In Trail of Lightning (Saga Press, 2018), the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Rebecca Roanhorse draws on Navajo culture and history to tell a gripping future-fable about gods and monsters.
The book launches The Sixth World, a planned four-part series set in the near future. The series title refers to the Navajo origin story, which says that our current world—the fifth—emerged after floods destroyed the previous ones.
In Trail of Lightning, the six world is wrought from similar devastation, a combination of earthquakes and rising seas. The Navajo Nation survives thanks to a protective wall and a shot of magic, which transforms the barrier into four culturally resonant materials: turquoise, abalone, jet and white shell.
The wall seals the nation off from not only the apocalypse but from white Euro-centric colonialism. Roanhorse considers her work a form of indigenous futurism that tells “a sovereign story, a story that exists on its own, on native land in native thought with native characters’ stories and processes that don’t have to acknowledge the larger, white western world. This is not a story that even has any white folks in it. This is a Navajo-centric story, and that’s on purpose.”
In creating a magic system, Roanhorse decided not to draw on Navajo spirituality. “There’s already a mess in New Age thinking about Native American spirituality as magic and yet somehow other spiritualities are not,” she says. Still, she wanted to make the magic “distinctly Navajo” so she turned to the concept of clans, which imbue her characters with unique powers.
For instance, the clan powers of the book’s protagonist, Maggie Hoskie, make her ideally suited to be a monster hunter. She is Honágháahnii, which means Walks-Around, giving her lightning speed. And she is K’aahanáanii, which means Living Arrow, making her, as Maggie herself puts it, “really good at killing people.”
Maggie’s powers emerge spontaneously in response to a devastating incident from her childhood.
“The clan powers answer your need,” Roanhorse says. “In Maggie’s case, her jumping off traumatic event was the murder of her grandmother, so what she needed then were those two powers … But often the coping skills that we learn in dealing with trauma—especially childhood trauma—may serve us in the moment but don’t necessarily serve us as we grow. And overcoming those and the baggage that comes with it is part of Maggie’s journey.”
The novel is a gripping action-adventure that all readers can appreciate but that holds particular resonance for Native Americans. Some readers have told Roanhorse that “they’ve never seen some of the things I talk about on the rez in a book… I had one reader say she cried the whole way through because she’s never gotten to see that.”
A Yale graduate and lawyer specializing in federal Indian law, Roanhorse didn’t get serious about writing until 2013. But she’s quickly made a name for herself. A couple days before we recorded her interview in August, she was honored at the 76th WorldCon with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™.” (The story also earned the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in May and is read by Lavar Burton on his podcast.)
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Humans might one day escape Earth, but escaping our biases may prove much harder.
That’s one of the lessons from Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic Books, 2017) set on the HSS Matilda, a massive generation starship where the nightmare of slavery persists hundreds of years after humans have fled their dying planet.
At the center of Solomon’s masterful debut is Aster, a young woman trying to figure out why her mother apparently killed herself shortly after giving birth to her 25 years ago. An Unkindness of Ghosts is a powerful story about oppression, racism, gender non-conformity, and the role of trauma in society and peoples’ lives.
The book earned a spot on many best-of-the-year lists, including the Guardian‘s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2017. It also made the shortlist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 2018 Locus Award for First Novel, and the Lambda Literary Award for best science fiction, fantasy or horror novel.
The Matilda is as complex as a planet with social castes and languages that have evolved so much over time that people who live on different floors don’t always understand each other. “Matilda first came to me when I was reading about the last slave ship to come to the Americas,” Solomon says in her New Books interview.
The Matilda’s black and brown citizens live in cramped squalor and endure constant violence at the hands of armed soldiers and the white, wealthy upper-deckers. But Aster refuses to be defined by threats and social controls. A brilliant scientist, she’s learned how to make medicines from plants that she grows herself. Despite having trouble reading social queues, she’s a fearless defender of her dignity and doing what’s right.
“How do you have hope when it’s not just you and your individual life, but it’s all your friends and family and it’s your parents and your grandparents and their parents and back and so forth and it really does seem like you’re trapped?” Solomon asks.
“I was the kind of child who every night, I watched the news and used to cry. I was very, very sensitive. Even as young as 10, I didn’t understand how people just went on in it. And so I think it’s no surprise that … that’s kind of an essential question of the novel.”
Her next book project—which she was embargoed from mentioning during the interview but which she subsequently tweeted about —is inspired by Clipping’s song The Deep “about descendants of enslaved Africans living in the ocean’s deep.”
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For Inspector J.P. Dillal, the main protagonist in K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit (Pyr, 2018), the expression “I’ve got a lot on my mind” takes on new meaning when he allows his bosses to replace a good chunk of his brain with a mobile crime lab.
What he gets in exchange for submitting to the risky surgery is a promotion that allows him to catapult to the top ranks of the Gattis Corporation’s police force. The life circumstances that lead Dillal to surrender part of his body is as much a part of the story as the brutal mass murder that he must solve with his new cybernetic implants.
While cyborgs are often depicted as superior to ordinary humans, Richardson doesn’t hesitate to describe the dark side of a surgery that reconfigures a significant part of a person’s body. Not only are many people repulsed when they see Dillal, but the surgery is still fresh, and he grapples with fatigue, infection, leaks, and other menacing complications.
His condition “is considerably less than optimal because that’s an aspect of a highly intrusive body change,” Richardson says. She herself had undergone major surgery while working on the book. “People who’ve never been through a major surgery are unaware of how long you continue to be less than normal.”
Richardson was inspired by a real-life crime, the Wah Mee massacre, which occurred in Seattle in 1983, transferring real-life ethnic tensions and police corruption to a new planet with its own culture and ethnic strife.
Blood Orbit represents a change of genre for Richardson, who previously authored the Greywalker paranormal detective novels as Kat Richardson. She switched from “Kat” to the gender-neutral “K.R.” to escape the misperception that “women writing urban fantasy actually write paranormal romance.”
“It was a perception I’ve been fighting since the very first book because the Greywalker novels are not particularly romantic. They’re detective noir in urban fantasy clothes. I’ve always been a detective writer, and fighting that fight every book for nine books was really disheartening.”
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The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it teach itself, change its programming, become independent? Can it outfox its human inventors, be guided by self-interest, have feelings?
While companies like Google and Facebook are competing to develop A.I. technology, science fiction writers are light years ahead of them, finding answers to these questions in their imaginations.
One of the most engaging A.I.s in recent years is Martha Wells’ Murderbot, a people-averse, soap-opera loving, snark-spewing and highly efficient killing machine. The first book in Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red, earned numerous honors this year, including Nebula and Locus awards. It also made the short list for the Philip K. Dick and Hugo awards. The second and third books—Artificial Condition, which came out in May, and Rogue Protocol, out next week on Aug. 7—are equally engaging, taking Murderbot on a journey of self discovery that one hopes will eventually allow it a chance to retire from the business of saving human lives and spend its days watching its beloved “entertainment media” in peace.
“Does it have a place in this world?” is the question at the back of its mind, Wells says. “It can’t go back to its corporate owner, which would destroy or erase it for going rogue; and it’s not sure it wants to go to a human who is offering it a home because it would still essentially be property.”
Despite its name, Murderbot is only murderous when work requires it. As it says on the first page of All Systems Red, “As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” Thus, even though it could seek revenge against its human taskmasters, try to amass power or wreak havoc (since it has “borked” the programs that restrain its behavior), it voluntarily elects to continue performing the function for which it was designed—providing security to “small soft” humans. Why it so often says “yes” to a dangerous assignment when it really wants to hide in a closet is as much a mystery to it as our motivations are to us. Perhaps all forms of “intelligence,” artificial or otherwise, could benefit from a few sessions on an analyst’s couch.
Wells has incorporated aspects of herself in Murderbot, a fact that resonates with readers. “I have some problems with anxiety and OCD and I’ve put those into the character… and one of the interesting things that’s happened is that people who also have bad anxiety and have other issues say that they saw themselves in this character and that was heartwarming to me.”
The final book in the series of novellas, Exit Strategy, is due out in October.
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Sam J. Miller loves cities. He lives in one, has a day job dedicated to making urban life more humane and fair, and has set his new novel, Blackfish City (Ecco, 2018), in a teeming metropolis full of people who are grateful to be there.
The fictional metropolis is Qaanaak, which floats in arctic waters like a massive 8-armed asterisk and serves as a refuge for those fleeing climate change, resource scarcity and war.
Like Miller’s hometown of New York City, the book is packed with diverse characters, including Fill, a privileged gay man suffering from a new horrifying disease; Kaev, a fighter who’s paid to lose fights; Ankit, chief of staff to a hack politician; and Soq, a gender-fluid messenger with ambitions of becoming a crime boss like the one he works for. They are strangers to each other until a mysterious woman, on a mission of rescue and revenge, rides into town on the back of a killer whale. This woman–an “orcamancer”–brings them close, revealing secret ties that had bound them together all along.
Miller uses his fiction to imagine solutions to problems he grapples with in his job as a community organizer and advocate for the homeless. “I wanted to imagine a city where many of the sort of problematic things that have been the prime directives of urban policy over the last 30 years in cities like New York were no longer true. Maybe you don’t need a racist police force in order to have a functional city; maybe you don’t need to make homeless people’s lives miserable as your prime mandate for how architecture and public space happen.”
Miller calls Blackfish City “a hopeful dystopia.”
“Yes, many of the things we love will be destroyed; yes, maybe there will be unspeakable horror in our future as a result of climate change or social injustice, but that doesn’t mean humanity is going to cease…. I wanted to imagine a dramatically transformed world that is still recognizably human and where things like love, and family and community and noodles can save us.”
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If Tolstoy had written Spoonbenders (Knopf, 2017), he might have started it: “All happy families are alike; each family of psychics is unhappy in its own way.” Then again, who needs Tolstoy when you have Daryl Gregory, whose masterful family drama is tied together with telekinesis, astral traveling, and genuine mindreading magic.
A Nebula Award finalist and an NPR Best Book for 2017, Spoonbenders tells the story of the one-time Amazing Telemachus Family, who have struggled to make ends meet ever since they were exposed as frauds on national TV. Only they really aren’t frauds. Most of them have true psychic gifts. The problem is that psychic gifts aren’t all that they’re cracked up to be.
As Gregory explains, “I was trying to figure out why if people have these powers … wouldn’t they just become rulers of the world? Why wouldn’t they become rich and famous, and I was struck by the rationale that Uri Geller always used, which is ‘there are so many things that can reach out and interfere with your powers that only a faker can make his powers work all the time.’”
Frankie Telemachus, whose get-rich-quick schemes have left him in debt to the mob, can move objects with his mind, but his ability never comes when he needs it. His sister, Irene, a grocery store cashier, is a human lie detector, which makes it impossible to have intimate relationships. And their brother, Buddy, is so worried about the looming end of the world (which he replays over and over again in his clairvoyant mind) that he devotes every waking moment to fretful, obsessive planning to prevent it.
The story is told from five alternating points of view, revealing a cascade of secrets that explain the siblings’ inability to lead fulfilling lives while laying a foundation for their future salvation.
Among the inspirations for the Spoonbenders is the U.S. Army’s Stargate Project, launched in 1978 to study the potential military uses of psychic phenomena. “I was intrigued by the idea that the government was buying into this… Up until 1995, we were throwing millions of dollars into it,” Gregory says. The book, in fact, is set in 1995, when a CIA agent hopes to save the program by recruiting Irene’s adolescent son, Matty, who has just discovered he can astral travel.
Gregory himself doesn’t believe in psychic powers. “I’m a skeptic but I do like it in science fiction.” The only magic he believes in is that which a writer produces from his imagination. “A reader with a writer is making the same kind of contract as an audience with a magician. You know that magician is trying to fool you; you want them to fool you… And that’s what I’m really interested in. You know I’m going to tell you a story… but hopefully you’re willing to go along.”
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Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male (Harper Voyager, 2017) is a work of science fiction inspired by a real-world dystopia: a country with tens of millions of “extra” men who will never find spouses.
The country is China, which in 1979 adopted its one-child policy in the hope of reducing its population of 940 million to around 700 million. The plan was intended to last only one generation, but it endured until 2015. The degree to which the policy has contributed to a drop in China’s fertility rate is an open question, since other factors (like rapid economic development) are also at play. But one consequence of the policy is clear: China now has millions more men than women.
An Excess Male made the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award Honor List and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. It also earned spots on a number of “best of” lists, including Barnes and Noble’s and the Washington Post’s lists of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of 2017.
The idea for An Excess Male came to King, a native of Taiwan, five years ago after she read a newspaper article about the gender imbalance. “The statistics say that by 2030, a quarter of the men over the age of 35 will not be able to find a wife,” King says in her New Books interview. But the problem impacts more than marriage; it also affects social order. “When you have 30 million men at the prime of their lives, testosterone-fueled, you have a society that’s more prone to aggression and violence and crime, or, if you go to the other end, dissatisfaction or possibly depression. It’s a very, very volatile mix.”
In An Excess Male, the government solves the problem by allowing (and incentivizing) polyandry. “What if a woman could marry more than one husband? I thought that would be a really provocative way to talk about how China, in favoring their sons, actually achieved the opposite and a very devastating effect,” King says.
The story is told through the eyes of the members of the family of Wu May-Ling, a woman with two husbands, and their suitor, Lee Wei-Guo, who aspires to be her third. One might expect such a complicated courtship to collapse of its own weight, but Wei-Guo’s determination to find love allows him to develop genuine affection for all three potential mates. Whether these bonds are mutual, however, becomes the crucial question when two characters, for different reasons, become enemies of the state and Wei-Guo’s would-be spouses must risk their lives to help each other as only a family can.
In her conversation with Rob Wolf, King discusses, among other things, the historical precedents for polyandry, China’s repressive policies toward homosexuality, and the role a writing group played in the shaping of her novel.
Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Jade City combines what its author, Fonda Lee, calls the 3 Ms: mafia, magic and martial arts.
Lee’s talent for depicting complex characters struggling with both internal and external conflicts earned Jade City nominations for the Nebula and Locus Awards. The book is her first written for adults. (Her previous books, Exo and Zeroboxer, were written for young adults and both were shortlisted for the Andre Norton Award).
Set in the fictional post-colonial nation of Kekon, Jade City (Orbit, 2017) introduces readers to an economic system governed by family-run clans, where power is obtained through conventional assets, such as the loyalty of businesses and politicians, as well as through use of the gemstone jade. Jade’s special powers include strength, agility and the ability to deflect weapons. But to harness these powers, a Green Bone warrior needs both an innate affinity for jade and extensive training.
Lee says jade was “the natural choice” for a magic substance. “In Eastern culture, jade is considered more valuable than any other substance. It’s been referred to as the stone of heaven.” It was also a natural choice for Lee—who has black belts in karate and kung fu—to require Green Bones to undergo years of practice before they’re allowed to use jade on the streets.
“One of the things I find frustrating/annoying about some fantasy stories is this idea that the magic is just given and you are just born with it, or you … get the magic sword and now you have the power. As any martial artist knows, achieving a level of proficiency involves a long arduous amount of discipline and schooling.”
In her New Books interview, Lee discusses her characters’ struggles with tradition and the challenge of balancing their personal desires with familial responsibilities. She also offers insight into the writing process—specifically, how she managed to polish an epic tale told from multiple viewpoints into a fast-moving page-turner.
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The technological “singularity” is a popular topic among futurists, transhumanists, philosophers, and, of course, science fiction writers. The term refers to that hypothetical moment when an artificial superintelligence surpasses human intelligence, leading to runaway—and unpredictable—advances in technology.
Among the biggest unknowns is whether or not the superintelligence will turn out to be benign of malevolent.
“All sorts of visions arise, one of which might be the total annihilation of humanity by [artificial intelligences] and robots. Another might be that we all get to live forever as the robots and A.I.s overcome aging and help us launch into space,” Douglas Lain says.
To some, Lain’s vision of the singularity in Bash Bash Revolution (Night Shade Books, 2018) might sound benign. It involves an idealistic government scientist, who designs an artificial intelligence named Bucky to prevent the apocalypse; in short order, Bucky decides the best way to do so is by enticing people to play augmented-reality video games.
But things turn dark when people abandon their ordinary lives—including jobs and families—to don virtual-reality headsets and become their favorite characters in retro video and arcade games.
Told through the social media posts of the son of Bucky’s inventor, Bash Bash Revolution is set in today’s America, with Donald Trump serving as Bucky’s most urgent problem. “It’s a race between Trump’s stupidity and the A.I.’s ability to transform society to make Trump irrelevant. That was certainly how [Bucky’s inventor] conceived of it. His task was to help the A.I save us from ourselves and save us from Trump,” Lain says.
Lain was a guest on New Books in Science Fiction in 2016 to talk about After the Saucers Landed, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. He is also the publisher of Zero Books, which specializes in books about philosophy and political theory.
A student of philosophy, Lain was partially inspired to write Bash Bash Revolution by philosopher and Marxist Guy Debord who argued in The Society of the Spectacle that images had become the ultimate commodity. “I thought ‘What if you really took that to heart?’” Lain says. “This concept of the singularity and being absorbed into virtual reality and video games and augmented video games is what I came up with—what the society of the spectacle would really be.”
Another inspiration for the book was his frustration with always losing to his son at video games. “I wanted to tell a story about a middle-aged father who could beat his son at Super Smash Bros. Melee,” he says.
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Jack Chen is a drug pirate, illegally fabricating patented pharmaceuticals in an underground lab. But when she discovers a deadly flaw in Big Pharma’s new productivity pill, corporate bosses hire a team of assassins to silence her.
Annalee Newitz’s novel Autonomous (Tor, 2017) isn’t only a fast-paced cat-and-mouse story. It’s also an exploration of the rapaciousness of capitalism and its ability to turn everything, even freedom, into a commodity.
Her first novel, Autonomous has been widely acclaimed, receiving Nebula and Lambda Literary award nominations. “I’ve written a lot about patents and how they affect innovation and how companies use patents to screw customers over,” Newitz, a journalist and founder of io9, says in her New Books interview with Rob Wolf. In Autonomous, she highlights how “something dry and wonky like patent law has a life or death hold over us.”
Newitz also turns the idea of robot rebellion on its head. “I wanted to tweak this idea that is such a big cliché in science fiction about a society that builds a bunch of robots to be their slaves, and these slave robots rise up and enslave humanity.” In Autonomous, which is set 150 years in the future, robots and human are in the same boat—both subject to servitude. “As soon as we can quantify something that we’re saying is equivalent to human life—we’re saying these robots are human equivalents—it’s super easy legally and ethically … to put a dollar value on human life.” And when that happens, “everyone will end up being enslaved,” she says.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe.
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Paris has a way of resisting history, absorbing change gradually instead of being transformed by it. The same can be said of Hallie, the protagonist of E.J. Swift’s Paris Adrift (Solaris, 2018), who is compelled by the threat of a future apocalypse to travel through time to key moments in history—and manages to do so without losing herself.
Swift’s novel is both a suspenseful chrono-adventure and a portrait of Hallie, a young British woman running from an unhappy life. When she gets a job in current-day Paris as a waitress at a bar, she makes intense friendships among the staff of hard-drinking ex-pats. She also finds a time portal in the keg room.
Hallie’s brilliance is in her economy of effort. For instance, with a simple suggestion whispered in the ear of architect Paul Abadie, she prevents the construction of Paris’ famous Sacré-Cœur Basilica (and thereby carries out an important leg of her mission). In a delightful twist, the church becomes a massive green windmill, turning into a symbol for an “Occupy Wall Street”-like movement that will give Marine Le Pen’s right-wing nationalist party a run for its money (and require another corrective intervention from Hallie).
It’s easy to imagine that traveling through time would become addictive, and Swift explores that possibility, turning the portal into an organic consciousness that literally seduces Hallie, as similar portals have done with other travelers, literally turning them into disembodied spirits. Paris Adrift becomes not just a race to save humanity but a struggle to save Hallie from the portal’s seductions.
In her conversation with Rob Wolf and Aubrey Fox, Swift discusses, among other things, her personal connection to Paris and the city’s allure, the challenge of making the plot of a time-travel story hold together, the power of small gestures to change history, and some of the authors she admires.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. Aubrey Fox is the author of Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Rob Wolf interviews Mur Lafferty about Six Wakes (Orbit, 2017), her novel about murdered clones that received nods for this year’s Philip K. Dick and Nebula awards—and, after the interview was recorded, the Hugo Award as well.
Lafferty is no stranger to awards, having won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2013. She has been podcasting since 2004, using the medium to serialize her fiction and host the shows I Should Be Writing and Ditch Diggers, the latter of which was also nominated this year for a Hugo in the Fancast category.
Lafferty talks about cloning laws, the risks of reading an unfinished novel in public, the lessons she learned from Agatha Christie, and the thrill of having her work nominated for science fiction’s most prestigious prizes.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Rob Wolf interviews Tim Pratt about his Philip K. Dick Award-nominated space opera The Wrong Stars.
Pratt is the author of over 20 novels, picking up a Hugo Award and nominations for the Nebula and many other awards over a productive and varied career. Until now, however, he’s written mostly contemporary fantasies, avoiding science fiction–even though he’s always been a fan of the genre. “I always thought I just wasn’t qualified to write science fiction,” he says. “I felt my grasp of the physics and orbital mechanics and the hard SF elements weren’t good enough.”
But after finishing his Marla Mason urban fantasy series, he was ready for something new–and no longer felt intimidated by the idea of writing science fiction. “I thought, ‘It’s not as if writing science fiction means I have to write utterly plausible, completely grounded, hard science fiction.’ There’s a continuum that at one end has hard SF and at the other end has Star Wars.”
The Wrong Stars is the first book in a planned three-part space opera that reveals Pratt to be a master storyteller. The novel has fascinating characters (including two colleagues who are sewed together into one entity by well-meaning aliens ignorant of human physiology). It’s got a plot of surprising twists that unfolds at a rapid clip. It’s got sufficient threats to the human race to keep the stakes high. It even has romance and humor.
And, of course, The Wrong Stars is full of the kind of mind-bending inventions and concepts that only an advanced alien species–or wildly inventive author–can devise.
“I actually literally made a list when I sat down and started thinking about making a space opera system—what are things I really love in science fiction? I like really interesting weird artificial intelligences. I like bizarre incomprehensible alien artifacts. I like talking squid from outer space. I like wormhole bridges and all the problems that come when you can travel places so quickly that you can violate causality. … I just wrote down all this stuff and I’m going to get most of it in the three books.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Born into a world where men vastly outnumber women, Etta is expected to choose between two roles: mother or midwife.
And yet the protagonist of Meg Elison‘s eponymous second novel chooses a third: raider, a job that allows her to roam a sparsely populated Midwest, witnessing the myriad ways people have figured out how to survive.
The Book of Etta is among this year’s nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award, following in the footsteps of its predecessor, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, which earned Elison the Philip K. Dick Award in 2015.
In Midwife, Elison explored the dangers of being female in the aftermath of an apocalyptic illness that killed more women than men and rendered childbirth nearly always fatal.
Etta is set a century later. The midwife is now revered as the founder of Etta’s hometown, Nowhere, and the midwife’s diary is a bible of sorts, the subject of study and interpretation.
Thanks to the midwife’s influence, women wield power in Nowhere. They are the leaders and decision-makers, and family life is organized into Hives, with one woman free to choose multiple partners.
And yet even in a town where women are safe and respected, Etta feels out of place. She is most at ease on the road, where she assumes a male guise, calling herself Eddy. In her lone travels, of course, it is safer to pretend to be a man. But Eddy is more than mere disguise. Over time, Etta realizes that Eddy is a true expression of her identity.
“People like Etta often grow up feeling that the strictures imposed on them because of their assumed gender don’t suit them at all,” Elison explains in her New Books interview. “In Etta, I get to react to a lot of the gender roles that are imposed on women. … and explore what it looks like to pursue your own individual destiny.”
The Book of Etta has many layers. It is an adventure story, as its hero looks for useful relics among the ruins. It is a rescue story, as Etta/Eddy seeks to free women trapped in bondage. And it’s a story about memory and the power of writing, as reflected in the biblical resonance of Elison’s titles.
“I was really drawn to the idea of people without books, people without the ability to print books… People who don’t have books will come to rely on diaries,” Elison says.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In this episode, Rob Wolf interviews Robert J. Sawyer, the author of 23 novels, about his most recent book, Quantum Night (Ace, 2016).
Sawyer is considered, as he puts it, “an optimistic and upbeat science fiction writer.” But you wouldn’t know that from Quantum Night.The book explores the nature of evil, and its conclusion is alarming: the vast majority of humans are either psychopaths, lacking empathy for others, or mindless followers.
Sawyer is one of the rare science fiction authors to earn Nebula, Hugo and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and he deftly juggles multiple plots lines in Quantum Night, everything from his main character’s painful effort to reconstruct lost memories to geopolitical machinations, including the U.S.’s invasion of Canada.
The story focuses on Jim Marchuk, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, and his discovery (which his physicist girlfriend independently confirms) that psychopathy affects two-sevenths of the world’s population—and that it can be diagnosed by taking quantum measurements of the brain. What makes this idea particularly scary, is that Sawyer was inspired by real-life theories from a wide array of disciplines, including the work of psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, physicist Roger Penrose, anesthesiologist Stuart Hammerof, and philosopher David Chalmers. (Sawyer includes in an afterword a list of over 50 non-fiction books on which he bases the theories in Quantum Night.)
Like the work of Milgram and Zimbardo—who were attempting through now infamous experiments to understand the psychological underpinnings of the Holocaust—Sawyer, too, is trying to understand the origins of evil.
“Could the kind of evil that was Nazi Germany happen again?” Sawyer asks during the interview. “Well there are some signs in some countries… that it is happening again.”
By the time he’d finished writing Quantum Night, Sawyer had come to believe that the story he’d told was pretty close to the way the world actually works, and that humankind consists of “a large number of mindless followers and a very small number of people who are skilled at manipulating them.”
But he insists humanity shouldn’t give up hope. Fighting evil is hard work but good can still prevail. In support of this idea, he cites another expert, Star Trek’s Dr. Leonard McCoy, who famously said: “I found that evil usually triumphs unless good is very, very careful.”
Related link:
—Ursula K. LeGuin’s speech accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards on November 19, 2014.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. In his new book for the MIT Essential Knowledge Series, The Future (MIT Press, 2017), Nick Montfort examines the writings of previous futurist writers, thinkers, and designers to provide an understanding of how the future can be constructed. In so doing, Montfort argues that the future is something we can shape instead of only predict. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Set 50-plus years in the future, Omar El Akkad‘s debut novel American War (Knopf, 2017) has been widely praised, becoming one of those rare books with science fiction themes to make numerous mainstream publications’ Best Books of the Year lists. It was, for example, among the 100 Most Notable Books in The New York Times, the Best Books of 2017 in GQ, and was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s top pick for Canadian fiction.
El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, grew up in Qatar, eventually moved to Canada, and now lives in Oregon. He has worked as a journalist, covering everything from the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement. He also spent two years covering the terrorism trials of the Toronto 18, which gave him insight into how young minds are radicalized and provided partial inspiration for his depiction of American War’s protagonist, Sarat Chestnut.
We meet Sarat when she’s an appealing, headstrong six-year-old and follow her, via El Akkad’s nuanced writing, as she grows up in a refugee camp, sees her family destroyed, and is groomed to commit acts of terror. Ultimately, she plays a pivotal role in the outcome of the Second American Civil War, and yet, in a reflection of the true-to-life nature of El Akkad’s storytelling, her motives aren’t the black-and-white of Hollywood, but remain murky.
Despite the book’s title, El Akkad tells Rob Wolf that he doesn’t feel he’s writing about America. “To me if was never a book about America but about the universality of revenge… That any of us subjected to the injustice of being on the losing end of war, being on the losing end of violence, break down the same way and become damaged the same way and become wrathful the same way. The book is set in an allegorical America.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Everyone knows that wild mushrooms can be dangerous, but David Walton in his new novel The Genius Plague (Pyr, 2017) raises the dangers to a new plane.
While victims of an unusual fungal infection enjoy skyrocketing I.Q.s, they also find themselves suddenly willing to sacrifice their own (and others’) lives to protect the Amazon rain forest, raising the possibility that the fungus—a species native to the Amazon—has hijacked their minds to advance its own ends.
In his interview with Rob Wolf, Walton discusses the wonders of fungi, how he finds time to write while juggling his responsibilities as both an engineer and father of seven, how he came to believe in evolution after growing up in a family that considered Darwin’s ideas “silly,” and the importance of shunning dogma.
The Wall Street Journal named The Genius Plague one of the best science fiction books of 2017. Walton’s first book, Terminal Mind, received the Philip K. Dick Award in 2008.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Rob Wolf interviews Becky Chambers, author of the Wayfarer series. The first book, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Harper Voyager, 2016), was originally self-published then quickly picked up by a traditional publisher, garnering numerous accolades. It was shortlisted for, among other things, the Kitschies, a British Fantasy Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her second book, A Closed and Common Orbit (Harper Voyager, 2017), was nominated this year for a Hugo for Best Novel and won the Prix Julia Verlanger.
Billed as a space opera, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet does the unexpected: rather than focus on battles or threats to civilization it offers an intimate portrait of the relationships among the nine members of the Wayfarer spacecraft’s multi-species crew. And with A Closed and Common Orbit, Chambers does the unexpected again: rather than follow the Wayfarer’s crew on a new adventure, it focuses on two of the lesser characters from the first book, offering poignant coming-of-age portraits in a far-flung corner of the universe.
In the interview, Chambers discusses how she creates new species and cultures in such convincing detail, why she decided to place humans in the humbling position of being a minor species in the universe, how being gay informs her sensibilities as an author, and the journey the The Long Way took to publication—from Kickstarter campaign to international acclaim.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter.
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In this episode, Rob Wolf speaks with Stephen Baxter, author of The Massacre of Mankind (Crown, 2017), the alliteratively titled sequel to H. G. Wells‘ alliteratively titled classic, The War of the Worlds.
Baxter is the author of over 20 novels and dozens of short stories. He’s won the John W. Campbell Award, the Philip K. Dick Award twice, and numerous British Science Fiction Association awards.
Few books (science fiction or otherwise) have had as large an impact on the modern imagination as The War of the Worlds. Since it appeared as a serial in a British magazine in 1897, it has been adapted for movies (at least seven times), comics, television, video games and, most famously, in 1938 for a radio drama by Orson Welles that reportedly caused some listeners, who confused fictional news for real, to panic.
In The Massacre of Mankind, Baxter envisions new technologies adapted from salvaged Martian equipment, the takeover of much of Europe by Kaiser Wilhelm, and, of course, the eventual return of the Martians, now vaccinated against the Earth-bound bacteria that vanquished them the first time.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter.
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Since their establishment, the Nebula Awards have proven a trusty guide to what the next generation will consider a classic.
Take for example, the inaugural award for Best Novel, which went to Frank Herbert for Dune in 1965. Dune‘s impact can be measured in countless ways–not only in the loyalty of critics and fans (who have left in excess of half a million ratings on Goodreads) but in the proliferation of sequels, prequels, movies, TV shows, games, and more.
The 2015 Best Novel winner, Naomi Novik (for Uprooted), joins the ranks of science fiction and fantasy’s greatest authors, including Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis, William Gibson, Octavia E. Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson and many more.
But the Nebulas, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, recognize more than novels. Award categories include stories, poems, and dramatic presentation.
The abundance of categories and nominees posed a challenge for Julie E. Czerneda, the editor of the newly-released Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 (Pyr, 2017), which anthologizes the winners of the 2015 awards. Although Czerneda had free reign to decide what to include in the anthology, she still had to fit everything within a strict word count.
Fortunately, Czerneda knows a thing or two about getting a book to print. As an accomplished anthology editor and author–her ninth and final novel in The Clan Chronicles series, To Guard Against the Dark, is out this month–Czerneda relished the freedom she had as editor of the showcase.
Every editor gets to put their stamp on it. “I’m the first one to put in novel excerpts for all the novels nominated,” Czerneda says.
Another first for the current anthology: the winners in all the major categories are women. In addition to Novik for Best Novel, Alyssa Wong won for Best Short Story, Sarah Pinsker for Best Novelette, Nnedi Okorafor for Best Novella, and Fran Wilde received the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. The Damon Knight Grant Master, which recognizes a distinguished career, was C.J. Cherryh.
This year’s editor, of course, is also a woman. For Czerneda, editing the showcase allowed her to celebrate a field to which she herself has made significant contributions.
The publication of her new book, To Guard Against the Dark, marked to the exact day the launching of her career as a writer in 1987 with the publication of A Thousand Words for Stranger. As it turned out, A Thousand Words became the first book in The Clan Chronicles. “Nine books, 1.6 million words later, I’m finishing it,” Czerneda says. “I like to leave possibilities, but I like to get to a good ending.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
A deft and searching exploration of genre theory through science fiction, and science fiction through genre theory, John Rieder‘s Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) makes a significant contribution to the efforts to grapple with science fiction as a category of analysis and cultural production.
Building on his previous work in colonialism and science fiction, Rieder’s book begins with an assessment of the scholarship on mass culture and the media flows of the early twenty-first century, when science fiction gained currency as a genre identifier. Drawing together analyses of educational curriculum, technologies of publication, and the social production and distribution of literacy itself, Rieder makes the case for understanding science fiction as a social convention familiar to authors, editors, booksellers, and readers, but often the worse for its encounters with the jagged edges of traditional genre systems. Calling on the work of Frederic Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari, Bowker and Starr, and Gary Westfahl, among many others, Rieder traces a history of what SF has meant and currently means, revealing a variety of motives at work in defining and employing the genre.
Allowing his argument to range backward in time to the various texts that have become touchpoints in the arguments about where science fiction began, and forward to the present in tracking the roles of science fiction across various forms of media, Rieder offers an analysis grounded in the social history of texts rather than their formal characteristics. Along the way, Rieder’s work explores and engages the ways that artists and fans have navigated and channeled the shifting ideas about what science fiction is, how we can know it when we see it, and who it belongs to as a literary strategy and a locus for community formation. Ur-texts make frequent appearances in the early going, with a careful reception study of Shelley’s Frankenstein taking pride of place. Further case studies draw insights from the work and experiences of Philip K. Dick, women fans and writers making gains for feminism in the 1970s, and more recent examples of Afrofuturism and indigenous futurism in North America.
Rieder’s book thus creates a “sketch of the history of SF” that shows the genre to be “a product of multiple communities of practice whose motives and resources may have little resemblance to one another” (11), but whose work we would all identify, somehow, as science fiction. Drawing on the fruit of both his forays in genre theory and their thorough exploration in well-designed case studies, Rieder closes the book by offering a new periodization of science fiction that will spur further work into the ongoing ideological power of the genre.
Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Artificial intelligence has long been a favorite feature of science fiction. Every robot or talking computer or starship operating system has contributed to our idealized image of the bits-and-bytes brain.
In (ID)entity (47North, 2017), PJ Manney further expands our vision of A.I. by uploading her human protagonist to a server; from there, he is replicated and downloaded, re-emerging in everything from a sex-bot to a vegetative man.
Published this month by 47North, (ID)entity is the second book in Manney’s fast-paced, plot-twisting Phoenix Horizon series. As the follow-up to the Philip K. Dick Award-nominated (R)evolution, her new novel is both an exploration of transformative technology and a thriller, set in a world where nations (including the U.S.) have collapsed, swathes of humanity face enslavement, and the future of civilization hangs in the balance.
One of Manney’s ambitions as a writer (in addition to entertaining readers) is to prepare the public for the possible impacts of new technology. “If we know that these things are coming, we can start forming opinions about what to do,” she says. “Because here’s the thing: nothing gets banned. [If] it gets banned in one country, it doesn’t get banned in another country. There’s no way that technology stops from happening.”
Manney likens the idea of transforming a human incrementally–gradually swapping cells for bits–to the thought experiment known as Theseus’s paradox, which asks: if you restore every piece of Theseus’s ship with an entirely new piece, is the final result still Theseus’s ship?
“I’m positing, yes it is,” she says, with regard to her protagonist’s transformation from man to super-sophisticated CPU.
While (ID)entity is set in the near future, Manney doesn’t expect that people will be able to save themselves to their hard drives soon. “Uploading is farther off than we think.”
The third and final book in the series, (CON)science, is scheduled for release in November 2018.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Malka Older‘s Centenal Cycle is set in the latter half of the 21st century and yet, like all good science fiction, it speaks to the current moment.
Null States (Tor, 2017), the second book in her series, builds on the first, Infomacracy, which introduced readers to a near future in which the Earth is crisscrossed by a network of small but stable democracies. But in Null States, efforts to strengthen and expand this world order are threatened by unknown plotters.
What makes Older’s books so timely is that they address some of the most vexing challenges of the Trump era, including the difficulty of separating truth from lies and the uphill effort to foster trust in government.
Drawing on more than a decade of experience working for organizations that provide humanitarian aid and development, Older’s books introduce the idea of mini-nations known as microdemocracies. These tiny states are capped at 100,000 citizens in an effort to ensure that the minority always has a voice. Each microdemocracy can vote for any government around the world, so that coalitions of micro-sovereignties are not massed in one geographic location but scattered around the globe. In a dense city, this means that different microdemocracies can arise every few blocks, with one (for example) under-girded by Rastafarianism and the next guided by the principles of Chabad.
In order to ensure the efficient and fair administration of this system, an organization called Information provides expert advice, education and resources. Older describes Information as a cross between Google and the United Nations. Perhaps Information’s most important function is to constantly stream verified, annotated facts to every citizen as an antidote to fake news, a term that has grown increasingly popular in recent years even though the underlying problem, as Older points out, has been “going on probably for as long as we can trace history and politics.”
For Older, science fiction is an opportunity to explore neither dystopia nor utopia but the real world in between — a place where her policy-minded imagination can explore practical solutions.
“I wanted to show some ideas I’d been thinking about that would improve things in some ways, but they could also make some things worse,” she says in her New Books interview. “There is no perfect system. We’re not aiming to find some system that will work for every case and every country and every group of people and then we’re done. I think what’s really important is the process and the struggle.”
Related links:
- Older’s short story Narrative Disorder and her essay The Narrative Spectrum appear in Fireside Fiction.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, from The New York Times to the literary journal Thema. Follow him on Twitter @RobWolfBooks
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Underground Airlines (Mulholland Books, 2016) is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we’d like to believe. In an alternative world, a gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service. He’s got plenty of work.
This may sound like a story from the United States of today, but in this version of America, slavery continues in four states called the Hard Four. On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn’t right with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.
Choosing to ignore his past, Victor suppresses his memories of his childhood on a plantation, and works to infiltrate the local cell of an abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines. Tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he’s hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who wont reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw’s case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child who may be Victor’s salvation. Victor himself may be the biggest obstacle of all though his true self remains buried, it threatens to surface.
Author Ben H. Winters, the author of nine novels, grew up in suburban Maryland and attended Washington University in St. Louis. Beyond Underground Airlines, his other works include the highly-regarded Last Policeman trilogy. Winters is the winner of numerous literary awards, including a NPR Best Book of 2013, the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, and the Edgar Award. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife Diana, a law professor, and their three children.
James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.
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The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) is the third novel by Claudia Casper and her first work of science fiction. Set in 2047, it tells the story of Allen Quincy through his journals. Quincy–nicknamed Mercy–is a former soldier struggling with memories of his long-lost family and the traumas he suffered during the third World War.
The story touches on complex issues such as genocide, climate change, and post-traumatic stress disorder. But it’s largely a book about one man’s struggle for survival and his attempt to find meaning in a world turned upside down.
The Mercy Journals won the coveted Philip K. Dick Award, which means it’s destined to be a classic, read for years to come.
Related to the interview:
- Claudia Casper’s essay, “Attending a Literary Award Ceremony in an Alternate Universe,” was published on Literary Hub.
Rob Wolf is the author of the science fiction novels The Alternate Universe and The Escape. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, from The New York Times to the literary journal Thema, and his work has been singled out for excellence by the New York Public Library, The Missouri Review, and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Patrick S. Tomlinson is a stand-up comic, political commentator, and the author of the Children of a Dead Earth series. In this interview, we discuss the first two books in the series, The Ark: Children of a Dead Earth (Book One) and Trident’s Forge: Children of a Dead Earth (Book Two), which follow the last humans eleven generations removed from Earth as their 10-mile-long spaceship arrives on a new planet.
As befits a man who wears many hats, Tomlinson’s books are not easily categorized, mixing mystery, science fiction, cultural commentary and adventure. The third book in the series, Children of the Divide, is due out in August.
Rob Wolf is the author of the science fiction novels The Alternate Universe and The Escape. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, from The New York Times to the literary journal Thema, and his work has been singled out for excellence by the New York Public Library, The Missouri Review, and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.
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In The Last Good Man (Mythic Island Press, 2017), Linda Nagata uses a brisk and bracing writing style to immerse us into the lives of private military contractors, in the near future. The team, basically moral individuals, work in conjunction with individually guided, robotic weapons and surveillance equipment. If Katheryn Bigelow, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, wrote a speculative fiction novel, it might be something like this. Wasting no words, the story stays right on track, concentrating on army veteran True Brighton as she and her teammates undertake a dangerous mission, which wakes old wounds.
For True, painful memories of her son’s death resurface, while her boss, Lincoln, must come to terms with a past decision he made for the greater good of the unit. True’s anguish and her questions about right action are absorbing and affecting. On another level, the story works as speculative fiction, inviting us to consider a future where AI combat replaces human soldiering more and more. The point of direct AI involvement is to spare the lives of soldiers, but as the novel shows, that goal isn’t always as simple as it sounds.
Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The Prey of the Gods, published by Harper Voyager on June 13th, is Nicky Drayden‘s debut novel, though she’s published many short stories. It’s a compassionate work, despite a neglected blood-thirsty goddess and an ancient spirit who assaults women in their dreams, in order to father his brood. Though set in 2064, boys are still boys, impulsive, playful, and needing to be brave. Families are still families, with traditional grandfathers hoping to share their ways with their descendants, although elders and parents often pose the greatest danger. Boisterously mixing mythology and science fiction, the novel moves along from multiple perspectives, keeping the ball rolling. Be sure to pay attention to the old man’s story about the mythological offspring he had; it serves as a framework to understand various characters and their newly acquired powers. Between cross-dressing politicians, a fashion-obsessed demon, and a bot revolution, there’s never a dull moment in Cape Elizabeth. An extravaganza of monstrous hybrid beasts, theatrical costumes, and riotous battles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, 2017), Aliette de Bodard‘s novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, is the follow up to The House of Shattered Wings, which won the 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award. The books are set in an alternate Paris, where dragons and other sea-creatures drawn from Vietnamese mythology control the river Seine, and the Fallen, ruthless angels expelled from heaven, control everything else. The reader is enveloped in gossamer threads of dread, as she reads about the struggles of various characters to escape domination and cruelty. Both the dragon kingdom and the Houses of the Fallen offer nuanced gradients of aggression; there is no refuge for the powerless. A pregnant Vietnamese woman, an immortal from Asia who lost most of his power, and a French woman who is addicted to the magic found in angel bones, all try to find their way among the shifting alliances, subterfuges, and occasional rewards of a decaying and rotting city. This is low fantasy: magic mixed with political machinations, the ethereal mixed with the pain of labor. With the plot occasionally taking a backseat to setting, there is nothing for it but to give yourself over to the heavy, evocative atmosphere, and let it subjugate you with its hypnotic cloud of magic. Ms. de Bodard’s observant eye captures the subtleties of various cultures, genders, and fantastical creatures in a believable and visceral way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Have you ever watched a futuristic movie and wondered if there will actually be any black people in the future? Have you ever been surprised, disappointed, or concerned with the lack of diversity demonstrated in many science fiction stories? In Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) the author analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan culture to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination. Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science reveals new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture and interrogates the meanings of race and genre through studies of science fiction, fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts.
Author and professor Andre Carrington earned his bachelors degree in African American Studies from Macalester College and a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. He is now an assistant professor of English at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on African American Literature, Comics & Graphic Novels, LGBT Literature and Culture, Global Black Literature and Literary Theory. His research focuses on the cultural politics of race, gender, and genre in 20th century Black and American literature and the arts. Carrington has devoted particular attention to considerations of cultural production and identity, especially those articulated in feminist criticism, critical race theory, performance studies and Marxism.
In addition to his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, Dr. Carringtons writings have appeared in the journals Present Tense, Sounding Out!, Callaloo, and African & Black Diaspora. In 2015, he organized the first international Queers & Comics conference through CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies in New York. His current research project, “Audiofuturism,” explores literary adaptation and sound studies through the analysis of science fiction radio plays based on the work of black authors.
James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Cory Doctorow has described Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning (Tor, 2016) as a book “more intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall.”
That praise reflects Palmer’s immense skill in building a world 500 years in the future but also her vast knowledge of the past. And it’s no surprise that Palmer knows something about the past. In addition to launching the first of a four-volume series with Tor, she is a cultural and intellectual historian at the University of Chicago, where she studies (among other things) the history of publishing and the Italian Renaissance.
She says that knowing exactly how the world has changed over the last 500 years – politically, culturally, socially – has helped her imagine plausible changes for the next 500.
In Too Like the Lightning, the 25th century is enjoying a reinterpretation of the 18th century Enlightenment, although with flying cars and non-geographic nations. Society congratulates itself for having banished organized religion and gender distinctions (Palmer writes much of the book using the singular “they”) but, as in so many cultures, people are blind to their own shortcomings.
“This is a particular future that didn’t do a good job finishing the end game of feminism and gender equality,” Palmer says, explaining that “they erased it too fast, stopped the conversation and consequently still have tons of baggage.”
Before she put pen to paper, Palmer spent five years planning the world of Too Like the Lightning, including forecasting the future history that shaped it. And it took another eight years for the book to be published.
But critics and readers agree that it was worth the wait. The second installment in the Terra Ignota series, Seven Surrenders, was originally slated for publication in December but Tor has pushed back the release to February to make room for a paperback version of Too Like the Lightning first.
Related link: Voltaire’s Micromegas
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
“The future begins with a traffic jam.”
This is how Eliot Fintushel describes the setting of Zen City (Zero Books, 2016), his science fiction novel about the obstacles encountered along the path toward spiritual fulfillment.
In Fintushel’s book, the quest for enlightenment manifests as a physical journey as his protagonist, Big Man, makes his way from an eternal traffic jam (in which people have been rooted so long on a highway exit ramp that they’ve created cults around their Econoline vans and Chevrolet Chevelles) to the City, where those who have achieved true enlightenment are literally merged into a single body-consciousness that transcends reality as we know it.
More than a commentary on Buddhism, the story is a meditation on religion and the challenge of using “robes and rituals” to find enlightenment, Fintushel explains. The problem is when enlightenment itself becomes a sign of status, he says, undermining the goal of enlightenment, which is supposedly a state of “no status.”
Fintushel’s adventure is both poetic and funny, meditating on language as much as belief. He is playing with the “limits of identifying things,” evoking the viewpoint of a baby. “If you watch a baby’s eyes moving around, they don’t fix on objects or even on people the way we do. They don’t have categories of objects and people. And I’m assuming, for the sake of the fiction anyway, that that’s more real than the reality of objects and things and people.”
Links related to things mentioned in the podcast:
Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen
Chogyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wallace Shawn’s “The Fever”
Shelley Berman’s joke about University of Chicago students
Eliot Fintushel’s YouTube channel and excerpts from his performance of Revelations.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Do not call Dave Hutchinson prescient. Even though his Fractured Europe Sequence envisions a continent crumbling into ever-smaller countries, the idea that his homeland could Brexit the EU had not occurred to him when he started writing Europe in Autumn.
The book chronicles the adventures of Rudi, an Estonian cook-turned-spy who discovers the existence of an alternate Europe, one in which the Eurasian continent has become a Brexiter’s dream come true, a bucolic but boring England that extends from Spain to Siberia.
Its sequel, Europe at Midnight, isn’t really a sequel but a spinoff, introducing new characters who explore the dark side of Europe’s parallel universes. Both books are imaginative, elegant and unexpected, combining elements of thriller and science fiction. And there’s more to come. A third book, Europe in Winter, is due out in November, and a fourth and final book, Europe at Dawn, is in the works.
I was fortunate to have Aubrey Fox as a co-host for this interview. He not only recommended Hutchinson’s books to me, but he’s an avid fan of both science fiction and mysteries. Among the topics Hutchinson discussed with us were the ideas that inspired him to write Midnight in Autumn, the ups and downs of his long writing career, his decision to write a series when he’d set out to write only a single book, and, of course, the Brexit vote, which took place the day after our conversation.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Aubrey Fox is author of Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In the fictional battles between humans and machines, the divide between good and bad is usually clear. Humans, despite their foibles (greed, impulsiveness, and lust for revenge, to name just a few), tend to find redemption, proving mankind’s basic goodness through love, friendship and loyalty. Machines, on the other hand, despite their superior physical and mental capacities, usually prove themselves to be (largely through the absence of the aforesaid capacity for love) to be dangerous and unworthy of the empires they seek to rule. But what if the humans and machines were combined – not merely cyborg-like in a jigsaw mix of man and robot but more elegantly, through a perfect blending of mind and matter? Ramez Naam does just that in his Nexus trilogy by wedding a human being’s soul – her memories, feelings and intellect – to the most powerful computer ever built.
In Apex (Angry Robot, 2015), the trilogy’s third installment and winner of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, things go awry. Su-Yong Shu, the brilliant Chinese scientist whose consciousness has been folded into a massive quantum computer deep under Shanghai, isn’t feeling so hot. In fact, she’s gone insane. It may seem, at first, as if Naam’s message is the same – that any artificial intelligence, when it gets smart enough (and even when it’s the result of a machine-human blend) craves power and will lead to mankind’s destruction. But Naam’s message is more complex: while the original computerized version of Su-Yong Shu goes on a destructive rampage, a copy of her consciousness in India finds its way back to sanity.
And through the journeys of these identical twins, we realize that Su-Yong Shu is neither human nor machine. She is something new, a powerful and mysterious being who has all the best and worst qualities of both man and machine – seemingly infinite capacities of intellect, strength, fear, paranoia and love. In his New Books in Science Fiction interview, Naam discusses the pluses and minuses of human enhancement, why he’s remained steadfastly optimistic about transformative technology since the 2005 publication of his non-fiction book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, and the extensive outlines he develops before sitting down to write. This is the second time Naam has appeared on the podcast. Dan Nexon interviewed him in 2013 about the first book in the trilogy, Nexus.
From the Interview:
“I have contact lenses in. I have a smart phone. I have a Fitbit. My fiance is on birth control. We have already upgraded ourselves quite a lot. My view in reality is that generally when you give someone the option of technology that improves their life in some way, and it’s safe enough and it’s cheap enough and enough people have done it already … people are just going to do it because people want these things. But everything is a little bit of a double-edged sword. No technology ever comes with zero downsides. So my phone means – the digital world means – that hackers can steal my identity or steal from my accounts, or it lets child porn go wild, or the NSA can spy on all of us far more easily.” –Ramez Naam
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Padma Mehta, the hero of Adam Rakunas’ Philip K. Dick Award-nominated novel Windswept, is part Philip Marlow, part Norma Rae, part Jessica Jones.
Theres no question that Mehta needs the skills of a union leader, noirish sleuth and action hero. Without them, how could she manage both the day-to-day machinations of helping run a blue-collar planet and simultaneously battle an interstellar corporate conspiracy?
Windswept is a fun book, full of action, plot twists and humor. But that doesn’t mean it shies away from grappling with important issues, including a looming environmental disaster — specifically a crop-killing plague that threatens to destroy the monoculture crop that the entire universe depends on.
Just as Mehta jumped through numerous hoops to save her world, so did Rakunas to get Windswept published. After working on the novel for several years, he sent the manuscript to 65 agents, and was rejected by 64 of them. The wisdom of the 65th to take him on was vindicated this past January, when Windswept was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Although it didn’t win top honors (which went to Ramez Nam, who will be featured in the next New Books in Science Fiction podcast), Rakunas is well on his way to establishing himself as a science fiction writer with a unique voice and vision.
Windswept‘s sequel, Like a Boss, will be published June 7.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Marguerite Reed‘s Archangel (Arche Press, 2015) introduces a hero not often found at the center of science fiction: a mother, who takes cuddling responsibilities as seriously as she does the fate of her planet.
Of course, Vashti Loren plays many roles besides Mom. She’s also a hunter, a scientist, a tour guide and the widow of a revered early settler. But Reed spotlights her relationship with her toddler, offering a protagonist who’s not only good with a gun but manages to get her kid to daycare on time.
“So many protagonists, whether in science fiction or fantasy or adventure fiction or film are disconnected or separate or isolated from family ties, and I wanted to see if I could write something where people did have family ties, where they were connected, as we so often are in the real world,” Reed says.
When Loren discovers that a genetically-enhanced and potentially dangerous human soldier has been illegally smuggled onto the planet, she must decide whether he is friend or foe. The former means she can enlist his aid to protect her world, a lush colony faced with the threat of massive – and potentially destructive – immigration; the latter means she must kill him. Ultimately, like a number of books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, Reed takes readers on an adventure that explores what it means to be human.
Archangel was one of six books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award. It received a special citation on March 25 at Norwescon.
The winner of this year’s award is Apex by Ramez Nam; I hope to have Nam as a guest on the podcast in the coming weeks.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks.
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PJ Manney‘s fast-action novel (R)evolution (47North, 2015) has all the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller: a terrorist attack using nanotechnology, a military-industrial conspiracy, a scientist who augments his brain – plus, of course, romance, betrayal, and rapid-fire plot twists.
The movie-style storytelling comes naturally for Manney, who spent most of her career in Hollywood, developing films and writing for television. “I don’t see myself as a literary stylist or as a great wordsmith. I see myself as a Hollywood-influenced storyteller,” she says.
A first-time novelist, Manney says she was “flabbergasted” when she was nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award. “I ended up melding genres and ignoring people’s advice,” she explains. “It doesn’t really fit neatly into any boxes and people who like boxes have a hard time with it…I thought it was just me and my editor who liked it.”
(R)evolution explores transformative technology – a brain-computer interface that relies on nano-materials to create a prosthetic hippocampus and cortex. Manney’s protagonist, Peter Bernhardt, seeks to use the technology for good–to aid brains destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease, but business and political forces try to grab the science for their own nefarious ends. Eventually, Bernhardt experiments on himself, pursuing super-human capacities to literally outsmart his enemies.
Manney had envisioned (R)evolution as a next-generation e-book: one with active Web links to provide context and background information and a soundtrack that allowed readers to hear the music that helps Bernhardt make connections and solve problems. “I wanted you to be able to play the music so you could actually experience his mental process. I wanted people to really have that sense of having a hacked and jacked brain. If you did have a quirkily wired brain to begin with and this ability to pull from endless amounts of data, what would that feel like?”
Yet while Manney’s imagination rushes headlong into the future, e-book technology moves at a slower pace. The e-book version of (R)evolution has no links or music. But Manney hasn’t given up. She is working furiously on the next installment, (ID)entity. That gives e-book designers a chance to up their game and, I hope, design an e-book format worthy of Peter Bernhardt.
(It’s not too late to sign up for a giveaway of the six books nominated for the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award. Entries will be accepted until midnight Pacific Daylight Time on March 22, 2016.)
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
This episode features author and futurist Brenda Cooper and is the second of my conversations with nominees for the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award.
Cooper’s novel Edge of Dark (Pyr, 2015) is set in a solar system where human are forced to confront a civilization they’d long ago banished: a race of super-beings who evolved from humans into cyborgs.
The idea of implanting human intelligence into an artificial body is not new. But Cooper gives it a fresh twist by making the ethics of human-robot blending the central theme of her book. The super-beings (called variously ice pirates and the Next) are returning uninvited from their banishment and, in addition to seeking access to natural resources, are offering immortality to anyone who wants it.
Cooper sees Edge of Dark as part of a conversation about the evolution of the human race. “I’m fascinated by transhumanism – what we’re going to become,” Cooper says. “I do think that we’re becoming something different… I’m exploring what the human soul might be about.”
All six PDK-nominated authors are participating in a book giveaway. To enter, visit this site. The authors also participated in a joint podcast where they interview each other. It’s available here.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In today’s episode, I talk with Douglas Lain, one of six authors whose works were nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award.
Lain’s novel, After the Saucers Landed (Night Shade Books, 2015) is set in the early 1990s, when aliens, with the theatrical sense of B-movie directors, land flying saucers on the White House lawn.
At first, the visitors seem fit for a Las Vegas chorus line; they’re tall, attractive and never leave their spaceships without donning sequined jumpsuits. Even the name of their leader–Ralph Reality–is marquee-ready.
But is Reality as real as he seems?
That’s the question that Lain poses for readers and his first-person narrator, Brian Johnson, who confronts the alien invasion head-on when one of the interstellar travelers assumes the identity of his wife. This propels Johnson into an examination of reality through various prisms: popular culture, science, philosophy, art, and even fiction.
A kaleidoscope of personalities, artists and thinkers are name-checked as Johnson and his colleagues search for the ultimate truth. There are as many nods to mainstream culture (think Elvis Presley, Arsenio Hall and David Letterman) as there are to high-brow (e.g., Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Baudrillard). And topping it off are the writings of ufologists, including the work of one of the characters, Harold Flint, who is so disappointed by the aliens’ tackiness that he decides to stop studying UFOs altogether.
“The big challenge is try and take sometimes abstract ideas and philosophical concepts and bring them to life in the story while not losing any of their complexity,” Lain says. Far easier, he found, was conveying the narrator’s sense of unease and growing paranoia as he learns more about the aliens. “I’ve spent far too much of my life in that kind of state, so it comes naturally me to write about that feeling.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
David B. Coe just finished a busy year in which he published three novels, two of which we discuss in this episode of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
His Father’s Eyes (Baen, 2015) is the second book (the first, Spell Blind, was also published in 2015) to follow the adventures of P.I. Justis Fearsson, a weremyste whose investigations are interrupted once a month during the full moon when he slips into psychosis. Dead Man’s Reach (Tor, 2015) written under the pen name D.B. Jackson, is the fourth book in the The Thieftaker Chronicles and focuses on Ethan Kaille, an 18th century version of a private detective (known poetically as a thieftaker) who also happens to be a conjurer.
While both protagonists share a number of traits (they’re both crime-solvers and both have magic powers) the series are quite different.
The Thieftaker books are partly historical novel, ones in which Coe (aka Jackson) interweaves real people (e.g., Samuel Adams) and events of pre-Revolutionary Boston (e.g., the Stamp Act Riots, the Boston Massacre) with mysteries that Kaille is trying to solve.
“I spend an enormous amount of time searching for these tiny historical details to bring the verisimilitude to my story,” Coe says.
Kaille’s opponents (who include those who would like Kaille to meet the same end as the alleged witches of Salem) are external. But the eponymous protagonist of Coe’s Case Files of Justis Fearsson series faces an internal enemy: the monthly psychosis that accompanies the full moon. These episodes are gradually making Fearsson permanently insane, as they did his weremyste father.
Related link:
- Here is a blog post in which Coe interviews his two protagonists from the separate series, Justis Fearsson and Ethan Kaille.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Katherine Addison‘s The Goblin Emperor has earned what might be termed a fantasy Grand Slam: the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and nominations for the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy awards.
To make her achievement even more noteworthy, Addison, like Maia, the royal goblin at the heart of the book, is herself a fiction.
The pseudonym was created by author Sarah Monette to satisfy the demands of the publishing industry. As she explains in our interview, her real name had become a “deal-breaker” after sales of the four books of her Doctrine of Labyrinths series had fallen short of expectations.
Tor Books was eager to buy her tale of an innocent and virtually forgotten heir who ascends to the throne of the Elflands after the simultaneous deaths of his father and brothers, but they had one condition. “Tor said, ‘We really want to take you on. We’re very enthusiastic and excited, but we can’t do it under your real name. You have to pick a pseudonym.’ And I wanted to continue having a publishing career. So I picked a pseudonym.”
While the name change might have given Monette a clean slate of sorts, it’s clear to me that The Goblin Emperor‘s success relies largely on her prodigious skills as a storyteller. But Monette modestly speculates that something else might also be at play–that people may also be drawn to an ingredient that is rare in fantasy: idealism.
“So much of fantasy right now has been so influenced by George R.R. Martin–which, hey, that’s excellent as it should be–but it does mean that things have been very grim and bleak and pessimistic and cynical,” she says. In contrast, The Goblin Emperor “is arguing that doing the right thing will win; that is, if you try your best to be ethical and compassionate, you will come out on top.”
There’s no question that Maia’s insistence on behaving ethically is refreshing. He faces down cronyism, social inequality and racism by hewing to the values of his Goblin mother, which lead him, among other things, to regard his subjects as equals.
“I wish I could say that I believed that worked all the time in the real world, but I think if we don’t make up stories where it does work, it’s never going to work,” Monette says.
I also find it refreshing that The Goblin Emperor is a stand-alone (this coming from someone who wrote a two-part series). Rest assured, however, that while Monette has no plans to revisit Maia, she remains loyal to the speculative genres.
“All fiction is lies but science fiction, fantasy and horror sort of flag themselves and say ‘Hey–not true. This isn’t what the real world is like.’ … The combination of the realistic and the openly unreal is to me something that is endlessly fascinating and that I want to do when I write and I enjoy reading when I find it.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
At a time when science fiction is more likely to portray ecosystems collapsing rather than flourishing, Jane Lindskold‘s Artemis series is an anomaly. Its eponymous planet is not an ecological disaster but rather full of so many wonders that it was once a vacation paradise for a now vanished society.
Of course, like any good science fiction (or fiction, in general, for that matter) Lindskold’s Artemis is full of surprises. But Lindskold takes care not to bludgeon readers with messages about the dangers of science run amok or human interference in nature.
“I thought it was completely possible to tell a story without lecturing people,” she says in her New Books interview. “I wanted to put together an exotic and interesting world and let people go adventuring on it with me and if along the way they figured out that ecosystems don’t work if they’re exploited, great but I’m not going to write lectures.”
Artemis is a genuine character in the story, one with an evolving consciousness that communicates regularly with one of the main characters. Lindskold has been frustrated that some reviewers have mistaken Artemis for an artificial intelligence when, in fact, she’s a highly complex network made out of various forms of fungi. As Lindskold puts it, “Artemis is a living organism that happens to have a planet-sized body.”
Artemis Invaded, published in June, is the second book set on Artemis. The first, Artemis Awakening, came out in 2014. Whether there will be a third remains to be seen, but Lindskold is full of ideas if she gets a green light from the publisher.
“I think a lot about the people on Artemis and what they are doing and would be doing, and I would find it very easy to pick up again. And one thing I’ve promised myself I would do is if there was a delay between the publication of Book Two and Book Three is that I would write some short stories so that the readership would have something in between.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
What do the jobs of opera singer, lawyer and science fiction writer have in common?
Answer: Melinda Snodgrass.
The author of the just published Edge of Dawn‘s first ambition was to sing opera. But after studying opera in Vienna, she came to the conclusion that “I had a nice voice, [but] I didn’t have a world-class voice.”
She then went to law school and worked for several years as a lawyer. Unfortunately, “I loved the law but I didn’t love lawyers,” she explains on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Her first published books were romance novels, which taught her the “extremely valuable lesson of how to finish what you start. Because that actually is a real problem for people. They’ll have brilliant ideas and write the first three chapters and they’ll never finish.”
Her first science fiction novels, the Circuit Trilogy, drew on her knowledge of the law as she chronicled the adventures of a federal court judge riding circuit in the solar system. She also collaborated with George R.R. Martin to create the shared world series Wild Cards.
It was Martin who encouraged her to write a spec script for Star Trek: The Next Generation. That spec script, inspired by the Dred Scott decision, turned into the episode The Measure of a Man, and a job as story editor for the series.
Her newest contribution to science fiction is Edge of Dawn, the third book in the saga of Richard Oort, who leads a team seeking to destroy beings from an alternate dimension that use religion to create strife on earth.
The trilogy is in large part a battle between science and religion.
“Science is all about doubt. It’s about saying, ‘is this real and how can I test it?’ … Religion is about the opposite thing entirely. It’s about faith and acceptance of it without questioning, and I think that that can lead to very dangerous results and outcomes,” Snodgrass says.
The idea for the series came to her New Year’s Eve in 1999. “I thought to myself, why on the dawn of the 21st century are people putting more faith in guardian angels and crystal healing power and tarot card readings than they are in medicine and chemistry and science? … Why are we seemingly going backwards and becoming more superstitious?” she says. “I cooked up this idea about these creatures encouraging us to believe in fairytales and to fear each other and hate each other on the basis of externalities like the color of our skin, or gender, religion all these different things.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
For his second novel, James L. Cambias chose one of the most challenging settings for a science fiction writer: the near future.
Unlike speculative fiction that leaps centuries or millennia ahead or takes place on other planets, a book about the near future presents a world that varies only incrementally from the present. The risk, of course, is that the author’s vision will all-too-quickly be proven wrong.
In his New Books interview, Cambias explains why he was drawn to the near future and how he navigated those tricky shoals in the writing of Corsair (Tor Books, 2015), which follows space pirates as they hunt and plunder treasure (hydrogen mined on the moon) using remote-controlled spacecraft.
Cambias is certain that space piracy will come to pass. “I absolutely expect that some point that space piracy or space hacking… will become a criminal enterprise. Space hardware is just too valuable,” he says.
Cambias also discusses the Hieroglyph Project, which is trying to get science fiction authors to write the kind of visionary fiction that has the capacity to spark brick-and-mortar innovation. Cambias contributed to the project’s collection of short stories but also penned a series of blog posts in which he declares the project a “failure.”
Related links:
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This is Cambias’ second appearance on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. His first interview, about his book A Darkling Sea, is available here.
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An episode of New Books was also devoted to the Hieroglyph Project.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
There’s far more to Swedish literature than Pippi Longstocking and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That’s the message Anna Jakobsson Lund and Oskar Kallner are trying to send the English-speaking world through their contributions to Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep (Affront Publishing, 2015), a collection of short stories by Swedish authors.
Until recently, the world of science fiction in Sweden was so small that it was possible to keep up with everything that was published. But no more. The genre, thanks in part to self-publishing, is “blooming,” Lund says.
The few big Swedish publishers are starting to catch up. “The big publishing houses think [science fiction and fantasy] is something that stops with young adults… and there’s not any status for a writer to be writing science fiction or fantasy,” Lund says.
But Kallner says, “Game of Thrones is beginning to change that.”
Lund says writing a story in English provided a chance to use more ornate language. “As a Swedish writer … you do things a bit minimalistic.” But English allowed her a fresh take. “I [could] use a bit more adjectives than I usually allow myself.”
In one sign of the difference between the United States and Sweden, Kallner says he has had some of his most successful book signings in grocery stores. “I usually stand somewhere between the bananas and loaves of bread and smile,” he says.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Porochista Khakpour moved to an apartment with large picture windows in downtown Manhattan shortly before September 11, 2001, giving her a painfully perfect view of the terrorist attacks.
“The big event of my life was of course 9/11,” Khakpour says. “I experienced a lot of post traumatic stress from it and think about it constantly.”
It’s no surprise that the assault on the Twin Towers features prominently in her writing. Through non-fiction essays and two novels, the Iranian-born writer has tried to understand the tragedy’s impact on her, the nation, and the world.
But while her essays are rooted in facts, her fiction takes flight. In The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury USA, 2014) there are, in fact, multiple references to flight. The main character, an albino man named Zal, is raised by his abusive mother in a cage among a balcony full of birds. Although he cannot fly, he yearns to. Rescued by an American and brought to New York in the years before 9/11, he tries to unlearn his feral ways and finds himself drawn to visionaries–an artist who claims to see the future and a famous magician who aspires, in a feat of illusionist virtuosity, to make the then still-standing World Trade Center disappear.
The character of Zal is based on a Persian myth and Khakpour infuses the story with fabulous twists and turns.
“My biggest challenge was doing a mythic retelling of a summer before 9/11 and not just any summer but Y2K to the summer before 9/11… Luckily, what was great about the realism was that the realism was quite surreal. If you look at the Y2K narrative, not to mention the 9/11 narrative, it’s full of the magical, full of the fabulist, full of the kind of impossible.”
In her New Books interview, Khakpour discusses the impact of 9/11 on “everyone”:
“I’m kind of amazed when I meet people who think it didn’t really affect them or the event wasn’t that big a deal in their life. Maybe the actual day wasn’t but their lives have completely been altered, even just economically. Anyone who has a job today has been affected by it.”
She speculates about the trepidation publishers might have had about a book that uses myth and fantasy modes to tell a story about 9/11:
“It took over two and half years to sell this book whereas my first book only took a few months…. If I’d done a purely realistic take from say a Middle Eastern woman’s perspective, my guess is it would have sold faster but this idea that I was using a fabulous mode, a sort of speculative mode, and addressing this sensitive world event and then add to the fact that here I am, you know, a brown person addressing this–that caused I think some complications.
About her connection to her protagonist Zal, who, like her is an Iranian-born immigrant:
“I don’t think I’ve ever written a character that I’ve identified with more.”
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Khakpour’s magician in The Last Illusion was inspired by the real life example of David Copperfield, who made the Statue of Liberty “disappear” in a television special in the 1970s. Here’s a clip on YouTube.
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Follow Porochista Khakpour on Twitter.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Ferrett Steinmetz first built an audience as a blogger, penning provocative essays about “puns, politics and polyamory” (among other things) with titles like “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex” and “How Kids React To My Pretty Princess Nails.”
In recent years, he has drawn accolades as an author of speculative fiction, writing short stories and earning a Nebula nomination in 2011 for his novelette Sauerkraut Station.
And now he is exploring new waters with the publication of his first novel, Flex (Angry Robot, 2015), which tells the story of a father desperate enough to use illegal magic to heal his badly burned daughter.
The title refers to crystalized magic that, when snorted, gives the user the power to manipulate objects for which he or she has a particular affinity. Cat ladies become felinemancers. Weightlifters become musclemancers. Graphic artists become illustromancers. And the protagonist, a paper-pushing bureaucrat by the name of Paul Tsabo, becomes a bureaucromancer, able to turn paperwork (with the help of flex) into a magical beast.
The only problem is that with flex comes flux–a pushback from the universe that re-balances any magic act with disaster.
Below are highlights from Steinmetz’s New Books interview.
On what he learned at Clarion Writers’ Workshop:
“Bit by bit they kind of stripped away my illusions and showed me how lazy I’d been and how much more effort I had to put to make my stories top notch. … I thought I was a one and a half draft person, but realistically I have to put in 5 drafts before the story starts to get good.”
On how paperwork can become magical in Paul Tsabo’s hands:
“He’s basically useless in a firefight but can send a SWAT team through your door by dropping a magically completed warrant for your arrest on a cop’s desk.”
On why he why a world with flex also needs flux:
“Flux evens out the odds of magic…. I really hate novels where magic is this thing you can do … without any kind of cost…. Frequently what I see is, ‘Oh, I’m a magician. I’ll raise an army of the dead and make my castle out of magic,’ and where is any challenge in that for your characters? Where do they have any stopping points to what they can do?… A big tension in the book as to whether the mancers should even use their magic.”
On his approach to writing:
“I’m what’s called a gardener writer in the business. There are plotters who basically sit down and plot out all their books beat by beat and know their ending the minute they start their first sentence. And Flex, like every story I’ve ever written– basically I wrote an interesting first paragraph and followed it randomly until the end of the book.”
On 9/11 as an inspiration for Flex:
“To a large extent the magic system in Flex is driven by a reaction to 9/11, where something really bad happened–and yes it really was bad… but we really overreacted that wasn’t helpful at all and in fact may have made it entirely worse for us.”
Related link:
- Follow Ferrett Steinmetz on his blog or on Twitter.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Despite the odds, Meg Elison did it.
First, she finished the book she wanted to write. Second, she found a publisher–without an agent. Third, she won the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, a stunning achievement for a first-time author with a small, independent press.
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (Sybaritic Press, 2014) is set in the American West after an epidemic has killed all but a fraction of humanity. Among the survivors, men vastly outnumber women, setting in motion a desperate journey of survival for the eponymous midwife. To avoid the serial rape and enslavement that threatens all females in this male-dominated landscape, the midwife sheds her name and even her sexuality, presenting herself as a man and continuously changing her moniker to suit the circumstance.
Communication falls apart too quickly for anyone to even know the name or nature of the illness that’s destroyed civilization and made childbirth a fatal event for female survivors. The midwife’s focus is on giving the few women she meets the hard-won power to prevent pregnancy. “I think the thing I wanted to come across most strongly was to explode notions of gender… And to really think about what your options would be like if you, like your grandmother, had no control over when you had children or how or by whom,” Elison says in her New Books interview.
Elison was raised on stories about the apocalypse–the fire and brimstone kind. “I grew up in some pretty crazy evangelical churches, and they hammered on us about the end of days and the Book of Revelation, and it gave me nightmares, and it made always think about the fact that the end was nigh and that it was going to be bad, and I think that stuck with me my whole life even though I shed the ideological parts of it.”
For the midwife, the apocalypse poses threats both dramatic and mundane. When not searching for food and a safe place to spend the night, she must negotiate the frustrating reality of spending time with people she doesn’t like. “I started thinking about what it would be like if the only people you could find were people you couldn’t stand, if they just irritated in you every way,” Elison says. “There’s nothing wrong with them and they’re not unsafe, you just don’t like being there. So I wanted to make a character who had to make choices between feeling safe in a group of people and feeling pissed off all the time.”
Elison is grateful for the editors at Sybaritic Press, who published her unagented manuscript. “They’re very good editors and publishers,” she says. But inevitably, she’s had to do a lot of marketing herself. “It’s good because I’ve learned a lot about the business doing that and it’s not good because no one listens to a writer on her own.”
Fortunately, the Philip K. Dick Award has made finding readers a whole lot easier. The award “has opened a lot of doors,” she says.
Related links:
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An article in the Los Angeles Review of Books explores the book’s treatment of “Gender and the Apocalypse.” [Note: the article has spoilers].
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Meg Elison shares her thoughts on her blog.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Short story writing, novel writing, and translating require a variety of skills and strengths that are hardly ever found in a single person. Ken Liu is one of those rare individuals who has them all.
He is perhaps best known for short stories like The Paper Menagerie, which (according to his Wikipedia entry) was the first work of fiction to earn Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards.
But this year he’s making waves with two longer projects, which are the focus of his New Books interview: his translation of Cixin Liu‘s The Three-Body Problem and his debut novel The Grace of Kings.
The Three-Body Problem has been a break-out success in China for Cixin Liu, who has won China’s Galaxy Award for science fiction nine times. The Three-Body Problem is also the first hard science-fiction novel by an author from the People’s Republic of China to be translated into English.
Ken Liu (who is not related to Cixin Liu) says sales numbers for science fiction in China would be the envy of American publishers, but Chinese publishers have traditionally considered it a niche market. That is, until The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels came along. Officially, Chinese readers have bought about 400,000 copies of the three-volume series but Liu says the actual number of readers is far larger as books get passed among friends and family.
Liu anticipated it would be difficult to translate the language of science, but the cultural references proved more challenging. Ultimately, he decided to add concise footnotes to fill in some gaps without overwhelming readers with too much information. The success of his translation is reflected in the The Three-Body Problem‘s Nebula and Hugo nominations for best novel.
The Grace of Kings, the first book in Liu’s projected Dandelion Dynasty, is a very different project–an epic fantasy/science-fiction mashup that Liu calls “silkpunk.” Liu grew up in a Chinese speaking household. “Every culture has its own set of foundational narratives that are echoed and dialogued with and re-imagined over and over again… They’re stories about how a people embody their own values and see themselves as having meaning in the universe.” In the case of The Grace of Kings, Liu drew from an ancient historical struggle known as the Chu-Han Contention but reimagines it in a secondary world, using both classic Western and Chinese storytelling techniques.
“The result is this melding of everything into this fantastical universe that I call silkpunk,” Liu says. “So there are battle kites and mechanical contraptions of various sorts, underwater boats and airships that propel themselves with giant feathered oars that represent the kinds of things you see in Chinese block prints and historical romances [but] sort of blown up and extended into a new technology vocabulary that I had a lot fun playing with.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
When an author creates a character, she can churn through as many re-writes as she’d like until she gets it right. This, of course, is in stark contrast to reality, where people get only one shot. There’s no going back, no do-overs, only an inexorable march to the end.
But what if life were different? Catherine Webb, under the pen name Claire North, offers two worlds where this is possible. In The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), she introduces the reader to kalachakra, people who are reborn into the lives they’ve already lived. The eponymous protagonist, for example, is reborn 15 times at midnight on the cusp between 1918 and 1919.
This is both wonderful and challenging, Webb explains in her New Books interview.
“It’s both liberating because he can go through his childhood knowing everything that’s going to happen in coming events because he’s already lived it, but it’s also horrendous because he can be 5 years old on his 11th life being treated like a 5-year-old… and being forced to re-live his ABCs even though he’s actually hundreds of years old.”
Touch (2015) offers a different way to escape the drudgery of a single, linear life. The main character, Kepler (a moniker assigned by those trying to destroy it), can travel from body to body with a touch. This allows it to live hundreds of years, experiencing the world like a tourist on an endless trip.
Inevitably, the life of a kalachakra or a body-hopping consciousness can become tedious. Harry August struggles with apathy, having seen that whatever he achieves in one life is erased with the reset of his birth. Kepler, too, struggles to find meaning beyond its focus on survival. The ingredients which ordinary people use to measure their lives don’t matter to Kepler. For one thing, it no longer has a gender because it can occupy men and women with equal ease. Nor does it have to experience even mild discomfort: whenever it encounters anything not to its liking, it can jump to another body. Even a hangnail can be enough to send it packing.
Webb herself is no stranger to multiple identities. A fan of pen names (she switches among Catherine Webb, Kate Griffin and Claire North depending on the genre and audience), she is as dexterous at changing writing styles as she is at inventing engaging characters and plots, although sometimes she’s only aware of the shift in style after the fact, almost as if someone else–her own Kepler perhaps?–had done the work.
“I’m not necessarily aware consciously of a decision to write in a different style. … The story has its own logic. I let that do the work, and then I’m surprised to turn around and discover that Kate Griffin sounds very different from Claire North.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
While there are many well known cult television shows still revered by fans, MST3K continues to have an incredibly large following with a thriving following 25 years after its final episode. Chris Morgan‘s book The Comic Galaxy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (McFarland, 2015) looks at the films used by the cast and crew to present their comedy. He discusses his love of the show and the importance of the movies riffed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live.
Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, first by her teachers at Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine, where she wrote Elysium as her final thesis, and later by the committee that selected Elysium as one of six nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award. (The winner will be announced April 3).
“I wasn’t sure there was a space for me in this writing world. And to a certain degree I still sort of wonder. But the idea that I could write and that my stories are worthy of being told was something [Stonecoast] really helped to foster in me,” Brissett says in her New Books interview.
In some respects, Elysium is simple: it tells a story of love and loss between two people. But Elysium is also complicated because those two people morph from scene to scene, changing from two brothers to father/daughter to husband/wife to boyfriend/boyfriend to girlfriend/girlfriend.
When imagining the future, conventional science fiction often focuses too much on gadgets and not enough on people, Brissett says. “We think [science fiction] is about … the new machines we’ll have, the little gadgets that will make our lives easier … but I think the civil rights movement is one of the most science-fictional things that could have probably happened, because all of a sudden this entire group of people that was totally ignored showed up at the table and said ‘We want in.'”
As a child, Brissett found the Wonder Bread future depicted in The Jetsons frightening. “I remember watching as a kid the Jetsons and thinking ‘That is an absolutely terrifying vision of the future. Where are all the black people?'” she says. “The future belongs to everybody. It doesn’t really belong to any one group. And yet when you see visions of the future, it’s usually mostly white heterosexual people wandering around.”
In the early 2000s, Brissett owned an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she experienced the publishing industry’s struggles firsthand. Rather that discourage her from becoming a writer herself, the experience seems to have solidified her desire to tell stories in the way she wants to tell them. “You have to love this field to be here. If you’re here for money, you are certifiably crazy,” she says.
Spoiler Alert
From 6:45 to 10:24 we talk about a major part of the plot, which is revealed on the book jacket but isn’t explained until near the end of the book. Listeners might want to skip this part (and not read the jacket copy) if they want to approach the story as a mystery whose answer lies in the book’s structure.
Related Links
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Elysium was inspired, in part, by Roman Emperor Hadrian’s love of Antinous.
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Brissett mentions her recently deceased friend, the writer Eugie Foster.
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She also mentions a number of her teachers, including Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
While science fiction often seeks to imagine the impact of new science on the future, Rod Duncan explores an opposite: what happens when science remains frozen in the past.
In The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter‘s alternate history, the Luddites prevailed in their protests 200 years ago against labor-replacing machinery, leaving science and culture stuck for generations in a Victorian-like age.
Against this backdrop, Duncan introduces Elizabeth Barnabus, who outmaneuvers the restrictions placed on her as a single woman by pretending (with the help of quick-change-artist skills) to be her own brother. “Gender identity and gender presentation is a theme that runs through Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter because in order to do certain things in her world she needs at times to cross-dress and do it in a convincing way,” Duncan says.
Elizabeth’s mastery of disguise–and her knowledge of deception acquired from her circus-owning father–allow her to earn a living as a private investigator and accept an assignment that brings her face to face with agents of the dreaded International Patent Office, which maintains a choke hold on scientific advancement.
In January, The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, validating Duncan’s decision to take a stab at science fiction. “I like to let ideas play in an imagined world and see what happens,” he says.
Asked if he found it difficult to write a first-person narrative in a woman’s voice, Duncan points out that all writers must overcome countless barriers to fully enter the minds of their characters.
“The book is about illusion and any writer trying to write from the point of view of someone different from themselves is trying to pull off some kind of illusion; they are trying with smoke and mirrors to seem as if they are realistically that person. … That person may be different in all kinds of … ways from the writer.”
Duncan explains that he is dyslexic. “So for me is it a bigger challenge to write from the view of someone who is not dyslexic or is it a bigger challenge to write from the point of view of someone who is from a different time or someone who is a different sex?”
In the end, Duncan says that all writers, like his protagonist Elizabeth, are cross-dressers “in a psychological sense because we have to put ourselves into the minds of other people.”
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The interview touches on the conjuring illusion “the bullet catch” from which the book derives its title.
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Ned Ludd and the Luddites also come up.
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The conversation concludes with a mention of Duncan’s role in the movie Zombie Undead. The trailer is on Rotten Tomatoes and the entire film in on YouTube.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
It’s no surprise that when scientists in Ben H. Winters‘ The Last Policeman series declare that a 6.5-mile asteroid is going to destroy life as we know it on October 3, civilization starts to unravel.
Governments collapse. People quit their jobs and abandon their families. Survivalists stock up on guns and food, imagining there’s a way to outsmart the impending holocaust. Fatalists sink into hedonism, depression or suicide.
And then there’s Hank Palace, a detective on the Concord, N.H., police force and the eponymous star of Winter’s trilogy. Faced with the end of the world, Palace does the almost unthinkable: he keeps doing his job.
“He’s taken an oath to uphold the law … and to him an oath is an oath, a promise is a promise, and it doesn’t matter what the context is,” Winters says in his New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interview.
Palace remains dedicated to his job as he tries to: determine whether an apparent suicide is actually a murder (Book 1); track down a missing person (Book 2); and find his sister, who’s joined a group determined to save the planet (Book 3).
Throughout the trilogy, Winters demonstrates a mastery of two genres, a fact reflected in the awards the series has collected. The first book, The Last Policeman, earned an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, while the second book, Countdown City, was recognized for excellence in science fiction with the receipt of the Philip K. Dick Award, and the third book, World of Trouble, which was published in July 2014, is a finalist for (another!) Edgar Award (the winner will be announced in April).
Like his main character, Winters likes to be prepared while remaining flexible. “I always start with a pretty good outline and then by the time I’m really deep into the book that outline is more or less thrown away and replaced by a different one,” Winters says. “I have to allow the outline to be there but for it to always be provisional, to always be a work in progress.”
Among other topics tackled in the interview are Winters’ optimism about human nature, the art of telling a compelling mystery, and some hints about his next book (a mystery in an alternate or “counter-factual” America).
Related link:
- Follow Ben H. Winters on his blog at http://benhwinters.com/, on Twitter at @BenHWinters or on Facebook.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Kameron Hurley has been honored for her mastery of numerous forms. Her first novel, God’s War, earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. Her essay “We Have Always Fought”–about the history of women in conflict–was the first blog post ever to win a Hugo Award. And although her tweets haven’t won awards (yet), she is also an animated and articulate presence on Twitter.
Hurley has lived with some of the concepts and characters in her newest novel, The Mirror Empire (Angry Robot, 2014) since she was 12. But it took patience and lots of hard work (including multiple revisions) for the story about mirror worlds on the brink of genocidal war to emerge.
Although her first book was a success, the other two books in the series, Infidel and Rapture, were hurt by the financial troubles of the publisher. Hurley rallied, finding a new agent and a new publisher, but the path wasn’t easy. As she says in her New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interview, “You’re only as good as your last book. If your last book doesn’t sell, then you’re not going to sell other work. … This is an up and down business. It’s not a straight trajectory. You have to work very hard, and I think that’s very motivating for me to know I have to work very hard just to stay in the game.”
While writing is a solitary affair, Hurley has surrounded herself with a circle of supporters–and advises everyone to do the same. “If you’re going to have a goal in life… You want to be a CEO, you want to open your own business, you want to be a writer [then] you need to surround yourself with people who support what you are doing. And that’s everyone. If your family doesn’t support what you do then maybe don’t see them as much. I hate to say it. And if you have a partner who doesn’t support what you do, then maybe you should look at a different partner. If the agent that you have is not working out and your styles just do not work and you’re not getting what you need from that relationship then you need to find an agent that works.”
Related link:
- Follow Kameron Hurley on her website and on Twitter.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
This week’s podcast was an experiment. Rather than record the conversation with author Alex London over Skype, I decided to take the subway to Brooklyn and meet with him face-to-face in a coffee shop. I found it liberating to be unchained from an Internet connection, which has been known to fail mid-conversation, but the price of having a barista nearby is boisterous background noise.
London’s novels about class conflict, debt, and rebellion are set in a grim future. A significant portion of Proxy takes place in a city where the poorest citizens dwell in a violent shantytown known as the Valve while the wealthy thrive in well-guarded neighborhoods of private speedways, luxury homes, and high-tech toys. The sequel, Guardian, is set in a crumbling Detroit exponentially more decrepit than the Motor City of today.
As London explains, the horrors of the Valve are his “futuristic re-imagining” of slums outside of Nairobi, which he witnessed while researching one of his non-fiction books, One Day the Soldiers Came, about children affected by armed conflict. “For a lot of children all over the world caught up in wars and poverty and natural disaster … dystopia is not some kind of fantasy but the day-to-day reality of how they are living,” he tells me.
Although the books portray a dark future, the publisher avoids the word “dystopia” in its marketing of Proxy and Guardian. “They call it a ‘futuristic thriller,'” London says. The marketing department also shies away from the science fiction tag, fearing it’s too narrow. But London says he embraces the label. “Science fiction for me implies … an awareness of possibility.”
London himself is brimming with possibility. For one thing, he writes under three names. Proxy and Guardian, which are aimed at young adults, bear the name Alex London. But as Charles London, he’s published adult non-fiction about war and the survival of beleaguered Jewish communities around the world. And as C. Alexander London, he continues to write for middle-grade readers about real-life war experiences and fantastical adventures involving squids and dragons.
Like any good science fiction writer, London seeks to push boundaries. Proxy explores what would happen if wealthy transgressors rigged a system of debt and credit to avoid punishment for their crimes and instead made the poor (known as proxies) receive the punishment instead. London also pushes cultural boundaries: Proxy and Guardian‘s main character, Syd, is gay, which makes him unusual as the star of a science fiction series geared for young adults. As a result, London has received an outpouring of fan mail from young people seeking advice. “It’s been very touching to see kids who might not otherwise be drawn to explicitly queer books … find their way to Proxy,” he says. Because the books are primarily thrillers, some kids, especially those living in conservative communities, feel safer reading them than gay-themed books that focus on romance or coming out, he explains.
“I’ve been getting letters from a lot of actually straight boys writing about their friends and wondering how they can be better allies. Those are my favorite,” London says.
Related link:
–Keep track of Alex London on his website and tumblr
Spoiler alerts:
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Astronomy and astrology once went hand in hand: people studied the location and motion of celestial bodies in order to make astrological predictions.
In the seventeenth century, the paths of these two disciplines forked so that today astronomy is a well-established science while astrology is allowed only as close to the word “science” as the suffix “pseudo-” allows.
Lydia Netzer, in How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), tries to turn back the clock, inventing a world where astronomy and astrology harmonize once again. The novel centers on two best friends (both astrologers), who conspire to raise their children (both astronomers) so that when they encounter each other as adults, they fall hopelessly in love.
All this takes place in the shadow of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, a “world renowned Mecca of learning and culture” that’s as fanciful as Netzer’s fictional Toledo, a city where “astronomers and mathematicians walk arm in arm down the street and discuss philosophy and cosmology,” she explains in her New Books interview.
For Netzer, writing is an opportunity to explore every cranny of her imagination. “Every time you write a book, you go into your kitchen and get everything you made, every dish in the oven, everything in the refrigerator, bring it all out, put it on the table because you might not get the chance to write another one, and you just want to say everything you can possibly say,” she says. “Holding back for me is a big mistake.”
Among the many topics Netzer addresses in the interview are lucid dreaming, which figures prominently in the novel. While her some of her protagonists gain mastery over their dreams, Netzer, in her own life, has met with less success. “One time … I was able to move a crate of lettuce closer to me in a dream grocery store, which was incredibly disappointing as an outcome. ‘Oh, you’ve managed to control your subconscious, and all you’re going to do is make it easier to buy produce.'”
She also discusses the various iterations of How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky, including a first draft without dialogue. “It was terrible, and I don’t have that draft anymore. Thankfully a very kind friend helped me to not share it with anyone else.”
Other topics include the mysteries of memory, the differences between first and second novels, homeschooling, and much more.
Related Link:
- Follow Lydia Netzer on her website and her Facebook page.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks
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Before Apollo 11, there was Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon. Before the Internet, there was Mark Twain’s short story From the ‘London Times’ of 1904.
In other words, before the appearance of many spectacular technologies, a writer imagined it first. This truth underscores one of science fiction’s abiding strengths: its ability to test concepts, both technological and social, without spending vast sums on research and development.
The editors and writers behind Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (William Morrow, 2014) think many science fiction writers in recent years have lost their way in this regard. As evidence, they point to the proliferation of what Hieroglyph co-editor Kathryn Cramer calls “tired dystopias.” Rather than provide “cautionary tales that show us what to avoid,” she explains in her New Books interview, these novels use “dystopias as furniture”–backdrops for a plot centered on a central character’s adventures.
In contrast, Hieroglyph seeks something different. “We’re asking for a science fiction that actually addresses problems and tries to solve them,” Cramer says. “And what they [the authors of the 17 stories in Hieroglyph] thought of were the problems is almost as interesting as what they think the solutions are.”
Among the topics Cramer covers in her interview are how she overcame her initial skepticism about the Hieroglyph initiative, how she and co-editor Ed Finn selected the writers included in the volume, and how the authors worked with scientists and researchers at Arizona State University to postulate plausible technologies based on current scientific understandings.
Don’t forget to follow New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy on Facebook and Twitter, post a review on iTunes, and follow host Rob Wolf on Twitter and his blog.
Here are some links related to the interview:
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Read more about Project Hieroglyph on its website.
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Hieroglyph was inspired in part by Neal Stephenson’s essay “Innovation Starvation“. It was originally published by the World Policy Institute and now serves as a preface to the collection.
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Cramer uses the term “neo-Gernsbackian,” which refers to Hugo Gernsback, who published the first science fiction magazine.
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What does it take to be an emperor?
That question is at the heart of Brian Staveley‘s debut novel The Emperor’s Blades (Tor, 2014).
In this first of a projected trilogy, Staveley focuses on three siblings. They are the children of the assassinated emperor of Annur, a descendant of the Goddess of Fire whose irises look like flames.
Kaden, the designated heir, has spent the last eight years training in far off mountains with monks. He’s physically strong and he’s learned to withstand deprivation. He’s also an expert at drawing pictures, capturing images perfectly in his memory and suffering the abuse of his never-satisfied teachers without complaint. But is he ready to take on the responsibilities of emperor, a position that will require him to hold together alliances, manage a large-scale bureaucracy, and foster the admiration of citizens on two continents?
In his interview on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Staveley describes the three types of tension that power good storytelling: psychological, social, and environmental. “If you’re writing a mountaineering story,” he explains, “the psychological tension might be one character’s fear of heights, and the social tension might be that two of the characters on the expedition hate each other, and then the environmental tension would be that there are constant avalanches trying to destroy them. And I think the stories I like … combine all three of those.”
Staveley also discusses how his experiences teaching ancient history, world religion and comparative philosophy to high school students helped him with world-building, his method for keeping track of his numerous characters and storylines (lots and lots of Word files), and the difficult task his characters face of separating myth from historical fact.
Staveley’s vision is enormous. Not only is The Emperor’s Blades itself intricate and multi-layered, but the author had originally envisioned writing seven books. His editor at Tor limited him to three, and Staveley expects to wrap up the series (known as the Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne) with the final installment in 2016. But with four books on the chopping block, readers can expect eventually to hear more about the world in which these events take places.
“The world is a large place,” he says. “There are always other stories to tell.”
You can learn more about Brian Staveley via his website.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Science Fiction: 101 (Roc, 2014) isn’t just an “exploration of the craft of science fiction” as its subtitle says; it’s also about the impact the stories in this anthology had on the imagination of a young boy.
That boy was Robert Silverberg, who was so inspired by the stories he found in pulpy magazines with names like Startling and Thrilling Wonder that he vowed he would one day become a science fiction writer himself.
He sold his first science fiction story in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia and never looked back. But lest anyone think the job of writer is easy, one of the messages of Science Fiction: 101 is that “hard work rather than superior genetic endowment is the basic component of most writers’ success.”
The collection contains 13 stories, most of which were published in the 1950s and from which Silverberg, in essays accompanying each story, draws lessons about the art of storytelling. The anthology was originally published under a different name in 1987 but has been out of print until this year when Roc re-issued it.
In his New Books interview, Silverberg touches on, among other things, his relationship with Isaac Asimov. At first, he knew and admired Asimov from his writing. But eventually, they became not only good friends but collaborators on several books, including the novelization of Asimov’s famous short story “Nightfall.”
Ever present in the interview are reminders of the wonder Silverberg felt as a boy reading science fiction. That wonder is all the more poignant now that Silverberg is in the autumn of his career (he says he doesn’t plan to publish any new novels although hasn’t ruled out writing an occasional essay or short story). “Science Fiction: 101 is aimed for the people who, like me, like Isaac [Asimov], like Ray Bradbury were beginners once.”
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Full Fathom Five (Tor, 2014) the third and most recent novel in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, features dying divinities and depositions, idols and investments, priestesses and poets, offerings to gods and options for shareholders.
As he explains in the podcast, Gladstone traces his initial inspiration for his Craft Sequence to, among other things, his several years teaching English in rural China, where he saw children of subsistence farmers grow up to become engineers and international bankers. “The thought that that’s really the kind of range that exists in the modern world sort of blew my mind open,” he says.
When he came back to the U.S., Gladstone experienced a kind of culture shock. “Coming back to billboards and advertising campaigns and bank account statements and all of that was this huge shock so I was forced to fall back on interpretive tropes from fantasy and science fiction … to grok it all.”
Another influence on his writing was the financial collapse of 2008 where the image of governments and banks rushing to salvage failing investment firms inspired him to write about necromancers trying to resuscitate dying gods.
Also in the podcast, Gladstone discusses his affinity for female protagonists, the role numbers play in the titles of his books, the risks of hidden bias in world-building fiction, and his new text based game Choice of Deathless.
For more about Gladstone, visit his blog here.
Here are links to some of people, books and things mentioned in the podcast:
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Author Ramez Naam.
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Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
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Author Hannu Rajaniemi.
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The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold
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The quotation about escape from Ursula K. LeGuin comes from her book The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. The quote is cited in a post on The Tolkienist about escapism as an elevating quality of fantasy literature.
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The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes and written and presented by Slavoj Zizek.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Strand a man on Mars with only a fraction of the supplies he needs to survive and what do you get? A bestseller.
Andy Weir‘s The Martian (Crown, 2014) has been on a journey almost as remarkable as its protagonist, but instead of surviving on an airless, waterless planet, The Martian has survived the inhospitable environment known as publishing, floating near the top of bestseller lists since the moment it was published.
The overall plot is easy to summarize: A manned mission to Mars is scheduled to last 31 days but is aborted in the middle of a life-threatening windstorm. The crew’s botanist-engineer Mark Watney is left for dead as the crew rushes to escape. Watney spends the rest of the book figuring out how to survive while the experts at NASA spend their time figuring out if they can rescue him.
Describing Watney’s strategies for survival are a bit more complicated. Everything that remains from the aborted mission is fair game for Watney’s imaginative repurposing. One by one, he turns the supplies and equipment that had been designed for a month-long sedentary encampment into tools to help him last hundreds of days while traveling thousands of kilometers across an airless, foodless terrain.
Watney turns oxygen to water, sterile Martian dust into fertile Earth-like soil, a vehicle meant for short roving exploration into a cross-country tow-truck; these and other transformations draw on a deep knowledge of science that puts the “hard” in the genre known as hard science fiction.
“I’m pretty nit-picky when it comes to science,” Weir says in his New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interview. “What bothers me is when there are blatant science errors [in science fiction]… like when someone takes off his helmet and holds his breath when he’s on the surface of Mars.”
Just as Weir has infused real science into his fiction, his fiction has returned the favor by transforming his real life into the stuff of fantasy. The success of The Martian has allowed him to morph from a writer-hobbyist, who originally self-published The Martian with zero expectation of financial reward, into a full-time author-superstar whose book is being developed for film by Ridley Scott and Matt Damon.
Related links:
Here are links to some things mentioned in the interview:
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The Egg, a short story by Andy Weir.
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A Talk at Google, in which Andy Weir demonstrates a computer simulation he created to determine the precise route of the Hermes spacecraft in The Martian. The demonstration begins around 14:00.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
History is shaped by cultures interacting either peacefully (through trade or art, for example) or violently, through war or colonialism. There doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid cultural intermixing–on Earth, at least.
Science fiction is another story. The crew of Star Trek was bound by the Prime Directive, the United Federation of Planets’ regulation that prohibited Starfleet personnel from interfering in the development of alien societies. James L. Cambias explores a similar idea in A Darkling Sea (Tor, 2014), but rather than accept the Prime Directive as an unexamined good, the narrative tackles the issue from a number of fresh perspectives–three perspectives, to be specific.
On one side is a team of human scientists who are trying to study a sentient species under six kilometers of a freezing, alien ocean. On the other side are the Sholen, technologically superior creatures who believe it’s their job to police inter-species interactions. And in the middle are the Ilmatarans, the giant crustaceans (think whale-sized lobsters) who the humans are trying to study.
Is it OK for the humans and the Ilmatarans to interact? The Sholen say no, and prohibit direct contact. This means the humans can only observe the Ilmatarans from afar. Since the Ilmatarans “see” via sonar, the humans coat their vessels and diving suits in radar-proof material in the hopes of remaining virtually invisible.
However, when one of the humans makes contact, all hell breaks loose. The Sholen order the humans to leave the planet; the humans refuse; and the Ilmatarans choose sides.
A Darkling Sea asks important questions amidst a page-turning undersea battle: Is it inherently destructive for a technologically advanced culture (or species) to interact with a less advanced culture? When different societies mix, must some groups necessarily win and others lose? Who defines what’s “advanced” and what’s “less advanced”?
The greatest danger of superior technology just might be the superiority complex that comes with it. In their hubris desire to prevent inter-cultural contamination, the Sholen are unaware that they’re breaking their own rules. As Cambias points out in the New Books interview:
There is a logical contradiction buried in [the Sholen] attitude because they’re trying to prevent advanced species from meddling with less advanced ones; that means that they, as an advanced species, have to go around meddling with less advanced species.
Also in the interview, Cambrias discusses the challenge (and fun) of inventing the Ilmatarans’ complex society from scratch, how his job as a game designer has both helped and hindered his storytelling, and space piracy, a topic he plans to explore at length in his next novel, Corsair.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
It wasn’t until Shelbi Wescott was deep into her career as a high school teacher that she published her first novel, Virulent: The Release (Arthur Press, 2013). The inspiration for the story came during a class for students who weren’t reading at grade level. “Part of my job in that class is to get students excited about literature,” she says. But one student remained disengaged despite her best efforts:
I had to call him after class one day and say ‘You actually have to give some of these books a shot. You might like them.’ And he was like ‘I bet you could even write a better book’ than the one we were currently reading. And I said, ‘I’ll take that challenge. Sure. OK.’
She handed the student a piece of paper and asked him to write down 10 things he wanted to see in the book. And then she sat down and wrote it. “That happened when he was a freshman and Virulent was published his senior year. That was a pretty exciting graduation present for him.”
It’s a heart-warming anecdote, one that belies the apocalyptic nature of the novels it inspired. Virulent: The Release, which became the first installment of a trilogy, starts with a bioterrorism attack that kills almost everyone. The story focuses largely on a handful of survivors hiding, and subsequently trapped, in a high school that, as Ms. Wescott explains in the podcast, is remarkably similar to the one in Portland, Ore., where she teaches. The narrative also draws on her experiences as a parent, exploring to what lengths parents might go to save their own children, even if others–perhaps even billions of others–suffer as a result.
On her web site, Ms. Wescott describes herself as “author, mother, teacher” but she could add “publisher,” having published her books independently. In her interview, Ms. Wescott discusses her experiences as an “indie” author and the fast-evolving world of self-publishing.
You can learn more about Ms. Wescott at Shelbi Wescott and Rob Wolf at http://www.robwolf.net/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
It’s clear to most scientists that human activity fuels climate change. What’s less clear is global warming’s long-term impact on geography, ecosystems and human society. If global warming continues at its current pace, what will life be like 50 years from now? A hundred? Five hundred? The further in the future we go, the more we must rely on science fiction writers to help us fill in the details.
In her debut novel Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta takes us to a future where the defining consequence of global warming is water scarcity. But more than a portrait of an environmental apocalypse, Memory of Water is about secrets and their consequences: an authoritarian government’s secrets about the past, a family’s secrets about a hidden source of water.
The book is also about language. Ms. Itaranta, who was born and raised in Finland and now lives in England, wrote Memory of Water simultaneously in Finnish and English. As she explains in her interview with Rob Wolf, this forced her to engage in a heightened deliberation about her choice of each word–a slow and exacting process but one that produced diamond-sharp prose. “It forced me to throw away anything that was unnecessary. It forced me to look at each word and each sentence very closely on an almost microscopic level,” she says.
Ms. Itaranta also talks about her interest in the Japanese tea ceremony and how it provided the kernel around which the book grew, her advice for writers tackling their first novel, her books reception among Finnish-speaking versus the English-speaking audiences, and her aspiration to create a new kind of heroine.
You can learn more about Ms. Itaranta here.
Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Southern California can seem magical, thanks to sunny skies, warm weather, orange groves and movie stars. In Greg van Eekhout‘s California Bones (Tor Books, 2014) the magic is real. The Kingdom of Southern California is ruled by osteomancers who draw power and wealth from potions derived from the bones of magical creatures. In his conversation with Rob Wolf, the new host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eekhout discusses, among other things, his interest in myths and magic, the impact of his Dutch-Indonesian heritage on his writing, protagonist Daniel Blackland’s complex relationship with his father, and Eekhout’s use of outlines to plot his books.
This is Rob Wolf’s debut interview as host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks
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[Re-posted with permission from Wild About Math]
I’ve admitted before that Physics and I have never gotten along. But, science fiction is something I enjoy. So, when Princeton University Press sent me a copy of Physics Professor Chuck Adler‘s new book Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2014), I was intrigued enough that I wanted to interview the author. This interview rambled, but in a good way. Chuck is a great guest, he’s passionate about physics and math as well as fantasy and science fiction. We flowed through a number of subjects and had a grand time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In this sequel to Zita the Spacegirl, Zita faces the perils of being a famous space hero. Ben Hatke once again combines whimsical and lovely drawings with a great sense of humor. Although I purchased Legends of Zita the Spacegirl (First Second, 2012) for my daughter, I think that I’ve re-read it nearly as many times as she has. For more information, check out E.C. Myers’ rave review of the series.
In this podcast, Hatke discusses his training as an artist, the origins and development of the Zita series, and provides fascinating information into how he conceptualizes and produces all-ages graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Hugh C. Howey, author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga, is best known for his self-published and bestselling series Wool. This post apocalyptic tale of human survival within the infamous silos has taken the world by storm. The Wool Omnibus Edition (Simon and Schuster, 2012) won the Kindle Book Review’s 2012 Indie Book of the Year award, in addition to making the bestseller lists in both The New York Times and USA Today. In the two years since releasing a series he originally believed “no one would care about,” it’s been picked up by Simon and Schuster for Canadian and US distribution, and film rights sold to 20th Century Fox. If you have yet to experience WOOL, it’s a recommended must read!
In this interview with Michael Zummo, Hugh shares his approach to writing, his endeavors in self-publishing, the origins of the Wool series, along with what’s coming up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Patrick James is the Dornsife Dean’s Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. A self-described intellectual “fox,” James works on a wide variety of subjects in the study of world politics. But one of his latest books, co-authored with Abigail E. Ruane, breaks even his eclectic mold. The International Relations of Middle-Earth: Learning from the Lord of the Rings (University of Michigan Press, 2012), sheds light on both international-relations theory and Tolkein’s epic fantasy by bringing the two subjects together. Fans, students, and scholars alike will find much of interest — and much to argue about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
R.S. Belcher‘s first book, Six-Gun Tarot (Tor, 2013), has receive widespread praise in the online reviewing community. It tells the fantasy-western-horror story of a Nevada town, called Golgotha, that is home to an unusual assortment of men and women, spirits and angels, and Lovecraftian waiting to unleash havoc upon the world. Throughout the book, Belcher retains a light touch, but also manages to explore the nature of coexistence among different ethnicities, faiths, and ways of life. On top of this, he juggles the points of view of a wide variety of characters. You should give it a try. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Ramez Naam is a computer scientist who lives in the pacific northwest. His debut novel, Nexus (Angry Robot, 2012), has received an impressive level of positive buzz, including an endorsement from one of our past interview subjects, Alistair Reynolds. Although this is his first work of fiction, Naam is no stranger to writing. His previous book, More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, received the 2005 HG Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism. As he discusses in the podcast, he has two books due out in 2013, including Crux, a sequel to Nexus, as well as a non-fiction work about technological adaptation and climate change, entitled The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. I hope you enjoy the interview, which ranges across all of these subjects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
I first learned about Felix Gilman‘s work from the influential academic blog Crooked Timber. I proceeded to read Thunderer, Gears of the City, and Half-Made World and found myself impressed by Gilman’s distinctive settings, themes, and voice. It should surprise no one, in my view, that Thunderer received a nomination for the 2009 Locus Award for Best First Novel and that it also garnered Gilman a nomination for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award in both 2009 and 2010.
Thus, when I agreed to host New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy I immediately contacted him about a podcast on The Rise of Ransom City (Tor, 2012). As a political scientist who works on state formation and international change I found The Rise of Ransom City as masterful account of the coming of modernity–as refracted through a fantastic setting. As Lev AC Rosen writes of it:
“The Rise of Ransom City continues Felix Gilman’s brilliant deconstruction of the mythology of the American West, putting it back together with magic and mechanics, and creating something so imaginative it seems to punch you in the chest. Narrator Professor Harry Ransom is a compelling voice; a teller of tall tales and showman, but whereas the snake-oil salesmen of the American West sold piss and ink, Ransom has a genuine miracle to sell. He is both liar and totally honest in ways that are sly and funny and sometimes tragic. This is a fantastic story of a war and a life told with incredible humanity and pizzazz, by a narrator who, like the world he inhabits, is bold and colorful and a wholly new sort of magic.”
Interested listeners might also read Johann Thorsson’s interview with Gilman.
A warning: the audio quality of this podcast is on the poor side. I hope that listeners will stick with it nonetheless, as Gilman has fascinating things to say about the themes and ideas at work in The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
When I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Michael is neither a science-fiction nor a fantasy author. He is, rather, a prominent historian of science at Princeton University. But his work intersects with the subject-matter of this podcast in a number of ways. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War asked us to consider what might have been had Tokyo refused to surrender and the US had continued to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Mike will soon start co-teaching a class on invented languages which includes a unit on Klingon. And the main subject of this interview, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), touches on both the history of science fiction, key themes within the genre, and where much of its source material comes from. Indeed, while this channel will continue to focus on new books within the SF and Fantasy genres, it will also interview scholars and practitioners whose expertise illuminates and enhances our understanding of those genres. I hope this interview does so for its listeners.
For those of you interested in a different take on The Pseudoscience Wars, you should check out Michael’s forthcoming interview on the New Books in Science, Technology, and Society channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Blue Remembered Earth (Gollantz, 2012) takes place roughly 150 years in the future. Climate change, as well as the political and economic rise of Africa, have transformed the planet. Humanity is colonizing the solar system. Geoffrey Akinya, grandson of a visionary businesswoman, cares most about his scientific work with elephants. His sister, Sunday, pursues the life of an artist in an anarchic commune on the moon. But their grandmother’s death sets in motion an interplanetary treasure hunt with the potential to change humanity’s future.
Alastair Reynolds‘ latest book has received much critical praise; there’s a sense among some science-fiction writers and fans that Blue Remembered Earth marks an important development in the genre itself. Whatever readers may think of it, Reynolds is a gregarious and fascinating interview subject, and I’m very pleased that he agreed to record this podcast.
Alastair Reynolds was born in 1966 in Wales. He holds a PhD in Astronomy and worked at the European Space Agency. His novel Chasm City won the 2002 BSFA, and nearly every one of his novels has been shortlisted for a major award. Reynolds is probably best known for his Revelation Space series. He is currently working on a sequel to Blue Remembered Earth and a Dr. Who novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Amy Peterson is a five-year old self-replicating android who lives with her synthetic mother and human “father.” Her struggles might be that of any super-intelligent youngster whose body and mind mark her as different than her schoolmates, but then her grandmother, Portia, appears at her kindergarten graduation and attacks her mother. Amy’s intervention leads to a startling result: she eats her grandmother and, in doing so, stores a self-aware fragment of Portia within a memory partition. She soon learns that Portia has a peculiar trait–she lacks the failsafe the prevents Vns from harming human beings. Now Amy must flee for her life while discovering the truth about herself and her inheritance.
vN: The First Machine Dynasty (Angry Robot Books, 2012) is Madeline Ashby‘s debut novel. Ashby is a strategic foresight consultant based in Toronto. She holds a masters degree in anime and manga writes on related subjects at io9, BoingBoing, and Tor.com. Her background and skill transform what might have been a straightforward work of Speculative Fiction into a provocative rumination on objectification, commodification, and the politics of difference. Peter Watts, author of Blindsight, describes Vn as picking up “where Blade Runner left off” and writes that “vN might just be the most piercing interrogation of humanoid AI since Asimov kicked it all of with the Three Laws.” I agree, and am considering assigning vN in my “Politics and Speculative Fiction” course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Lark Ainsley lives within a near-hermetically sealed city located in a world scarred and depleted my magical wars. The Architects, who oversee the City, maintain it by harvesting the non-renewable magical energy found in each of the city’s inhabitants. But something goes wrong on Lark’s “Harvest Day,” and she soon finds herself on a quest to find safety outside the City’s walls–where the disappearance of magic has rendered the landscape a wasteland full of sadness and danger.
Skylark (Carolrhoda Books, 2012) is Meagan Spooner‘s debut novel, and the first installment of a planned trilogy. Spooner manages to weave a fresh and clever tale out of familiar elements, and her flair for blending darkness and light makes for a very enjoyable read. She also has some very interesting things to say about young-adult fiction, its place in SF and F, and about the transition from unpublished author to holding contracts for multiple books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
“D.B. Jackson” is David B. Coe’s pen name for his new historical-fantasy series, The Thieftaker Chronicles. Thieftaker (Tor Books, 2012) centers on Ethan Kaille, a private detective and conjurer, as he investigates a murder in colonial Boston. David, who received a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University before embarking on a career as a novelist, weaves in plenty of period details and historical personages into an alternate Boston where conjuration is real, albeit suppressed by the authorities. David maintains a page of resources for those interested in his well-researched setting. He also is a co-founder of, and co-writer for, a blog dedicated to assisting aspiring speculative-fiction and fantasy authors with all aspects of the craft.
Theiftaker has met with excellent reviews, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I enjoyed it a great deal. David proved a terrific interview subject. I contacted him on a whim, and he was very generous to agree despite the channel not even existing at the time. I was saddened to learn, however, that not only was there no actual conjuration in eighteenth-century Boston, but no thieftakers worked there either.
Writing under his own name, David has published the LonTobyn Chronicle–a trilogy that received the Crawford Fantasy Award as the best work by a new author in fantasy–as well as the critically acclaimed Winds of the Forelands quintet and Blood of the Southlands trilogy. He has also written the novelization of director Ridley Scott’s movie, Robin Hood. David’s books have been translated into a dozen languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
I met Ken MacLeod when we participated in a sequence of “Science Fiction and International Orders” panels at the London School of Economics in the winter of 2011. Ken is an important figure in his own right, as well as someone who has contributed a great deal to the Speculative-Ficiton community through, among other things, cultivating the talents of other writers. He’s also an incredibly nice guy. All of these traits explain why he was one of the first people I approached about doing an interview for the channel, and the first to agree.
As I hope comes through in the interview, I found The Night Sessions (Pyr, 2012) both fun to read and intellectually stimulating. It centers on DI Adam Ferguson as he investigates the murder of a priest in a near-future Edinburgh. Following the “Faith Wars” of the early twenty-first century the world has experienced a “Second Enlightenment” and aggressive secularism enjoys intellectual and political hegemony. But not every soul, whether organic or mechanical, is happy with this state of affairs….
Ken has an Honours and Masters degree in biological subjects and worked for some years in the information-technology industry. Since 1997 he has been a full-time writer, and in 2009 was Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University. He is the author of thirteen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to Intrusion (Orbit, 2012), and many articles and short stories. His novels and stories have received three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
In our very first fiction-book interview on New Books in Secularism, we chat with Alyson Miers, author of Charlinder’s Walk (CreateSpace, 2011). In this adventure secularism-themed novel, Miers introduces us to Charlinder, a curious and daring young man who lives in the year 2130. The world he lives in is vastly different from the one we know today. Due to a plague that swept the earth and killed most of its inhabitants in 2010, Charlinder lives in a time where modern technology is gone, communities are isolated from each other, and surviving winter is once again a struggle. Why the earth succumbed to such a devastating plague over 100 years because is a cause for tension in his village of Paleola. On one hand there are those called the Faithful, who argue that the plague was God’s punishment for the evil deeds of human beings, whereas the rest of their small population is skeptical. Worried about rising disagreements and what it means for his village – Charlinder sets out on a world trek to find out the truth, with very surprising consequences.
It is difficult to put this book down once you start reading it, as Miers is very adept at transporting us into a world that is hard to imagine – a world without most of us in it.
Miers’ blog is called The Monster’s Ink, and she is also on Facebook, Goodreads, and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
It is not often that fictional accounts might warrant serious consideration by military historians, but in the case of Frederic Krome‘s recent book, Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914-1945 (Routledge, 2011) some of the most fantastic stories from the realm of pulp science fiction are given a second look. Surprisingly these stories turn out to have far more to tell us about how many in American society during and between the World Wars. Krome’s book is a delightful collection of long-lost short stories from the age of the pulps, each presenting a unique view at future military technology and wars. While some border on the fantastic, others have proven to be far more prescient than one might think. The value of Krome’s collection is multi-dimensional: Fighting the Future War not only offers a view into how earlier generations processed the experiences of two wars, depression, and the rise of fascism; the book also provides interested readers with a wealth of counter-factuals, fantasies, and imaginary conflicts that each offers insights into the cultural milieu of the first half of the American Century. Researchers, teachers, and casual readers alike are certain to enjoy this impressive work, which itself promises to open up a new line of historical discourse for all who read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
If technology is the site of digital culture, then robots are the future platforms of our social projections and interactions. In fact, that future is already here in small but fascinating ways. Mark Stephen Meadows is one of a handful of curious authors who have begun to explore the social ramifications of robotic engineering and his book We Robot: Skywalker’s Hand, Blade Runners, Iron Man, Slutbots, and How Fiction Became Fact (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) is intended as a lively assessment of those implications and consequences.
The book sees Meadows touring the strange, wonderful, and unnerving production laboratories of Japanese roboticists, lifting unreal loads with the aid of an augmented limb, and being turned on by an uncannily sexy fembot as she smiles at him and moves her android features. In our interview I asked Meadows what we can expect from our machine compatriots of tomorrow, and why human intelligence might be slowly getting written out of the equation for the perfect bot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
