New Books in Science Fiction

Today I talked to Benjamin Resnick about his novel Next Stop (Simon and Schuster, 2024) A hole opens in the universe and suddenly consumes a building, then a neighborhood, and then the entire country of Israel. Conspiracies and antisemitic paranoia simmer, violence erupts, and life for Jews around the globe becomes even more hate filled. But Ethan and Ella, both Jewish, meet and fall in love in an unnamed American city. Their relationship has its challenges, including those involving Ella’s seven-year-old son, but their biggest struggle is trying to survive. Then thousands of airplanes disappear, borders close, and the world unravels more. Drones and robotic dogs patrol the streets and Jews are forced to live in a single neighborhood, slyly named after the historical Pale of Settlement. Some Jews escape to underground cities and others are join militias and resistance efforts, but Ella and Ethan are trying to find things to smile about in this thought-provoking, dystopian novel about cultural memory, societal crisis, and living in an upside-down world.  Benjamin Resnick is a writer and the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center. Before joining the PJC in 2021, he served as Rav Beit HaSefer at Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago and as Rabbi and Education Director at Congregation Ahavas Achim in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Resinick majored in Literary Arts at Brown University in 006 and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2014. He has written nonfiction for multiple publications, including the Washington Post, The Forward, Tablet, Modern Judaism and My Jewish Learning. Benjamin is married to journalist Philissa Cramer, who is currently editor-in-chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. They have two boys, Jonah and Gabriel. In his free time, he enjoys gardening, playing squash, and the Chicago Cubs. 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 been almost five years since a wrathful extraterrestrial called Rex perpetrated a mass shooting that caused hundreds of millions of people to take their own lives. The world has mourned its losses and moved on, trying to adhere to The Pledge to save themselves from more violence. But when a solar storm conceals the dangerous activities being done at the hotel, Tia must figure out who these strangers are and what they are doing before the shooting's anniversary. Are these strange and beautiful people adhering to The Pledge? Or are they creating their own violent and nefarious rules in order to change the world? Tia has only days to determine whose side they are on-not to mention, whose side she is on-but first, she must stay alive. CK Westbrook’s books are spellbinding and most enchanting. Just when you think you are reading a sci fi book filled with fantastical stories about extra-terrestrial characters who can control all things earthly, it dawns on you that the author is trying to convey something very important about our planet. A woman of many talents—a mystery writer, an environment expert on space and space debris and someone with a superb imagination—CK Westbrook knows how to tell a story which is what makes her books come to life. As she begins introducing new characters in The Aftermath (4 Horsemen, 2024) who were not known to readers previously, I felt as though I knew what Tia was experiencing as she walked down the street with row-houses in a neighborhood that was reminiscent of her childhood, or was it? Where did she grow up and what does growing up mean in Tia’s world? As the story unfolds these questions become very relevant. Will there be a fifth book? Will readers have an opportunity to learn more about Rex, Kate, Sinclair, Tia and Ian? I hope with great anticipation that there will be other “teachers” CK Westbrook introduces us to so we can learn more about ourselves, space and her fantasy world that is peppered with truth and fiction. Westbrook crafted a world that feels both post-apocalyptic and very real to the present. And oh man, when that big reveal hits... watch out. - P.C. Nottingham, sci-fi author of the Earthquake War series Westbrook has created an imaginative and surprising post-shooting world with suspenseful twists, while providing fascinating commentary on society through the revelations and choices Tia, the main character, confronts. - Chelsea Henderson, author of Glacial, The Inside Story of Climate Politics Westbrook’s books are spellbinding and enchanting. - Karyne Messina, Ed.D. author, psychoanalyst, and podcast host for 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

When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man's-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024), introduced by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17. Often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” Bennett possessed incredible range; her groundbreaking stories—produced largely between 1904 and 1919—suggest that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large. Bennett's work has anticipated everything from the work of Philip K. Dick to Superman comics to The Hunger Games, making it as relevant now as it ever was. Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett, 1884-1948) was the first American woman to publish widely in fantasy and science fiction. Her five short stories and seven longer works of fiction, all of which appeared in pulp magazines such as Argosy, All-Story Weekly, and Weird Tales, would influence everyone from H.P Lovecraft to C.L. Moore. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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 different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy. Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalised in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by Dr. David Seitz is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

n this special Star Trek Day episode on the New Books Network, hosted by Dessy Vassileva from Vernon Press, we celebrate over 55 years of Star Trek with a deep dive into the book Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier (Vernon Press, 2023). Co-editors Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis join the discussion to explore how Star Trek has shaped science fiction and contributed to broader academic and cultural conversations around speculative fiction. The anthology, unlike many works that focus on specific parts of the franchise or narrow perspectives, offers a multidisciplinary look at Star Trek, with contributions from scholars across disciplines. From the franchise’s 1966 debut to its latest incarnations, the book covers its influence on fandom, its philosophical and societal implications, and its exploration of contemporary issues such as post-humanism and conspiracy theories in Voyager. The co-editors emphasize Star Trek’s unique ability to address diverse topics and inspire action, both in academic circles and fan communities. The origins of the book trace back to an invitation from Vernon Press, when Emily approached Amy for a collaboration that eventually resulted in two separate volumes—one on Star Wars and one on Star Trek. Both books have garnered significant academic interest, and the co-editors aimed to create works accessible to scholars, students, and fans alike. In this episode, Amy and Emily also reflect on their personal journeys into science fiction, from Amy’s early exposure to Star Trek through her family, to Emily’s adult discovery of the franchise after a passion for speculative fiction ignited by Harry Potter. Their conversation highlights Star Trek’s ability to continue resonating with global audiences, addressing issues of diversity, social justice, and human potential in an ever-evolving narrative universe. Listeners interested in the sister volume on Star Wars can check out the related podcast episode here: Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away. Vernon Press – Bridging Scholarly Ideas and Global Readership 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 People of the Ruins (originally published in 1920), Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neo mediaeval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, he eventually decides that he prefers the post civilised life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction. One of the most critically acclaimed and popular postwar stories of its day, The People of the Ruins captured a feeling that was common among those who had fought and survived the Great War: haunted by trauma and guilt, its protagonist feels out of time and out of place, unsure of what is real or unreal. Shanks implies in this seminal work, as Dr. Paul March-Russell explains in the book's introduction, that the political system was already corrupt before the story began, and that Bolshevism and anarchism—and the resulting civil wars—merely accelerated the world's inevitable decline. A satire of Wellsian techno-utopian novels, The People of the Ruins is a bold, entertaining, and moving postapocalyptic novel contemporary readers won't soon forget. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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 years, fans have been clamoring for novels about the Horus Heresy - the bloody civil war that set Space Marine against Space Marine and nearly spelled the end of mankind at the hands of the traitor Horus. False Gods takes the epic story onwards as Horus struggles to keep his armies in line and the seeds of his downfall are sown. Join us as we speak with Graham McNeill about one of his several contributions to the Horus Heresy series, False Gods! Graham McNeill, currently a freelance writer, has written for Games Workshop and for Riot Games in Los Angeles. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller, and Empire, the second novel in the Sigmar trilogy, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award for best fantasy novel. You can visit Graham’s website here: https://graham-mcneill.com/ Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus, and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus, and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption, and Numbers 1-19, Numbers 20-36. He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.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

'Star Wars' is a global phenomenon that in 2022 celebrated its 45th year of transmedia storytelling, and it has never been more successful than it is today. More 'Star Wars' works than ever are currently available or in simultaneous development, including live-action and animated series, novels, comics, and merchandise, as well as the feature films for which the franchise is best known. 'Star Wars' fandom is worldwide, time-tested, and growing; academic interest in the franchise, both inside and outside of the classroom, is high. This accessible and multidisciplinary anthology covers topics across the full history of the franchise. With a range of essays by authors whose disciplines run from culture and religious studies to film, feminism, and philology, Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away (Vernon Press, 2023) speaks to academics in the field, students in the classroom, and anyone looking to broaden their understanding and deepen their appreciation for 'Star Wars'. 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 story collection Convergence Problems (DAW Books, 2024), Wole Talabi investigates the rapidly changing role of technology and belief in our lives as we search for meaning, for knowledge, for justice; constantly converging on our future selves. In “An Arc of Electric Skin,” a roadside mechanic seeking justice volunteers to undergo a procedure that will increase the electrical conductivity of his skin by orders of magnitude. In “Blowout,” a woman races against time and a previously undocumented geological phenomenon to save her brother on the surface of Mars. In “Ganger,” a young woman trapped in a city run by machines must transfer her consciousness into an artificial body and find a way to give her life purpose. In “Debut,” Nairobi-based technical support engineer tries to understand what is happening when an AI art system begins malfunctioning in ways that could change the world. The sixteen stories of Convergence Problems, which include work published for the first time in this collection, rare stories, and recently acclaimed work, showcase Talabi at his creative best: playful and profound, exciting and experimental, always interesting. 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 the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Netflix’s new screen adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. We discuss the battle between the eye and the idea in film and television science fiction, and whether the new show strikes a successful balance. We consider some of the challenges involved in adapting this distinctively Chinese literary work for a non-Chinese audience, and what might have been lost in doing so. And we think more broadly about the genre of hard science fiction: to whom does it appeal and what is it trying to accomplish? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she'll decide who may cross her town's heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it's the same valley, the same town. Except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it's twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness. When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn't supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he's still alive in Odile's present. Edme--who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile--is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil's top candidate. Yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future. A breathlessly moving "unique take on the intersection of fate and free will" (Nikki Erlick, author of The Measure), The Other Valley (Astria Books, 2024) is "a stellar debut, full of heartbreak and hope wrapped up in gorgeous prose" (Christina Dalcher, author of Vox). Scott Alexander Howard lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature. The Other Valley is his first novel. Jan Zwicky, The Long Walk Morgan Talty, Fire Exit Lily Wang, Silver Repetition Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion, caste, and class—became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. Translated into English for the first time, in The Inhumans and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024) you'll discover The Inhumans (1935), Hemendrakumar Roy's satirical novella about a lost race of Bengali supermen in Uganda. Also included are Jagadananda Ray's “Voyage to Venus” (1895), Nanigopal Majumdar's “The Mystery of the Giant” (1931), and Manoranjan Bhattacharya's “The Martian Purana” (1931). The stories were selected and translated by Dr. Bohdisattva Chattopadhyay. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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 moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone? Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland (FSG, 2024) is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times. Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels PARAKEET (New York Times Editors’ Choice) and 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection SAFE AS HOUSES (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, and elsewhere. She has been awarded The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference. Her work has twice been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing program at Yale University. Recommended Books: Tea Obreht, The Morning Side Diana Khoi Nguyen, Root Fractures Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. 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 if HIV started spreading in the early 1500s rather than the late 1900s? Without modern medicine, anybody who catches HIV is going to die. In Wages of Sin (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024), by Dr. Harry Turtledove, a patriarchal society reacts to this devastating disease in the only way it knows how: it sequesters women as much as possible, limiting contacts between the sexes except for married couples. While imperfect, such drastic actions do limit the spread of the disease. The ‘Wasting’ (HIV) has caused devastating destruction throughout the known world and severely limited the development of technology as well, creating a mid-nineteenth century England and London almost unrecognisable to us. This is the world Viola is born into. Extremely intelligent and growing up in a house full of medical books which she reads, she dreams of travelling to far-off places, something she can only do via books since her actions and movements are severely restricted by both law and custom. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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 slender novel of epic power, Orbital (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023) deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet. Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief, The Western Wind and Orbital. She is also the author of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, among many others. She lives in Bath, England, and teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Recommended Books: Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos Allen Rossi, Our Last Year Miranda Pountney, How to Be Somebody Else  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

On a slow autumn afternoon, an atmospheric physicist working at the Malta Weather Station receives a surprising email from a colleague working in the United Kingdom: something troubling has apparently been detected during one of their research flights. The ensuing meteorological mystery is the starting point for the science fiction novella The Clouds (Routledge, 2023). Alongside the novella, this book features three essays written by the same author that discuss in a more explicit and conventional way three philosophical ideas showcased in The Clouds: the expressive use of fictional games within fictional worlds; the possibility for existential meaning within simulated universes; and the unnatural narratological trope of "unhappening." With its unique format, this book is a fresh reflection on the mediatic form of philosophy and a compelling argument for the philosophical value of fiction. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. 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 been over a decade since a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy. Evan Whitesky led his community in remote northern Ontario off the rez and into the bush, where they’ve been living off the land, rekindling their Anishinaabe traditions in total isolation from the outside world. As new generations are born, and others come of age in the world after everything, Evan’s people are in some ways stronger than ever. But resources in and around their new settlement are beginning to dry up, and the elders warn that they cannot afford to stay indefinitely. Evan and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Nangohns, are elected to lead a small scouting party on a months-long trip to their traditional home on the north shore of Lake Huron—to seek new beginnings, and discover what kind of life—and what dangers—still exist in the lands to the south. Moon of the Turning Leaves (William Morrow, 2023) is Waubgeshig Rice’s exhilarating return to the world first explored in the phenomenal breakout bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow: a brooding story of survival, resilience, Indigenous identity, and rebirth. Waubgeshig Rice is an author and journalist from Wasauksing First Nation. He’s written four books, most notably the bestselling novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, published in 2018. He graduated from the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2002, and spent most of his journalism career with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a video journalist and radio host. He left CBC in 2020 to focus on his literary career. In addition to his writing endeavours, Waubgeshig is an eclectic public speaker, delivering keynote addresses and workshops, engaging in interviews, and contributing to various panels at literary festivals and conferences. He speaks on creative writing and oral storytelling, contemporary Anishinaabe culture and matters, Indigenous representation in arts and media, and more. He lives in Sudbury, Ontario with his wife and three sons. 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 in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Jarret Keene's, Hammer of the Dogs (University of Nevada Press, 2023),  is a literary dystopian adventure filled with high-octane fun starring twenty-one-year-old Lash. With her high-tech skill set and warrior mentality, Lash is a master of her own fate as she helps to shield the Las Vegas valley's survivors and protect her younger classmates at a paramilitary school holed up in Luxor on the Las Vegas Strip. After graduation, she'll be alone in fending off the deadly intentions and desires of the school's most powerful opponents. When she's captured by the enemy warlord, she's surprised by two revelations: He's not the monster her headmaster wants her to believe and the one thing she can't safeguard is her own heart. Hammer of the Dogs celebrates the courageousness of a younger generation in the face of authority while exploring the difficult choices a conscionable young woman must make with her back against a blood-spattered wall. It's a story of transformation and maturity, as Lash grapples with her own identity and redefines the glittering Las Vegas that Nevada is known for. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Under the direction of founding editor Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age series is reissuing notable proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto–science fiction classics, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning genre. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

My Heart Is Human (Space Wizard Science Fantasy, 2023) by Reese Hogan is about a human and robot who come to occupy the same body. The body belongs to Joel Lodowick, a single parent and trans man whose only wish, at the story’s outset, is to raise his five year old daughter in peace. The robot is Acubens, who has been warehoused for nearly 10 years until Joel tries to activate him. At first, Joel is excited for the advantages Acubens’ conjoined consciousness confers, like the ability to get a much higher paying job with Acubens’ ability to make any numeric calculations with dizzying speed. But when Acubens—professing to have only Joel’s best interests at heart—threatens to erase Joel’s memory as part of an “upgrade,” Joel gets more than he bargained for. Complicating their relationship is the fact that in this near future world, all technology has been outlawed. If the authorities discover Acubens has been reactivated—and worse, that Acubens is taking up more and more space in Joel’s mind—they both risk being destroyed. Reese Hogan is a transmasc science fiction author of four novels. His short fiction has been published in The Decameron Project, A Coup of Owls, and on the Tales to Terrify podcast, as well as in two anthologies. In addition to writing, Reese enjoys singing in the local gay men’s chorus and running. He lives with his two children in New Mexico. 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

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song’s account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard for a conversation about the archives, methods, and cosmologies that inform his speculative fiction. Clark’s fiction blends fantasy and horror elements with richly drawn historical worlds that speak to his academic life as a historian. Most recently, Ring Shout (2020) maps Lovecraftian horror into the Ku Klux Klan’s 1920s terrorism in the U.S. South, while A Master Of Djinn (2021) brings angels and the titular djinns into a steampunk version of Egypt focalized around a pair of female detectives with the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. The conversation probes the way Clark’s work limns “the supernatural and the mundane,” delving into his formative experiences with the everyday presence of ancestors in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, the way he writes deities into mortal stories without flattening free will, and why he is committed to writing stories that talk about nations, politics, and racism, even in worlds where the supernatural is just as present. As the episode wraps up, Clark talks about the process that led to his celebrated 2018 story “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” which consists of nine vignettes imagining the lives of the enslaved people whose teeth Washington used for his dentures. Stay tuned for Clark’s iconic answer to this season’s signature question—a must-listen for anybody who has always suspected there’s something weird lurking beneath the surface of children’s television! Mentioned in this Episode andré carrington’s Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction Them! The Day the Earth Stood Still Boris Karloff Vincent Price Star Trek The Twilight Zone The Bayou Classic Toni Morrison Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time Edward Said’s Orientalism The Battle of Algiers The Maxim gun The George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia Michel-Rolph Trouillot National Museum of African American History and Culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Godzilla emerged from the sea to devastate Tokyo in the now-classic 1954 film, produced by Tōhō Studios and directed by Ishirō Honda, creating a global sensation and launching one of the world’s most successful movie and media franchises. Awakened and transformed by nuclear weapons testing, Godzilla serves as a terrifying metaphor for humanity’s shortsighted destructiveness: this was the intent of Shigeru Kayama, the science fiction writer who drafted the 1954 original film and its first sequel and, in 1955, published these novellas. Although the Godzilla films have been analyzed in detail by cultural historians, film scholars, and generations of fans, Kayama’s two Godzilla novellas—both classics of Japanese young-adult science fiction—have never been available in English. Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama (U Michigan Press, 2023) finally provides English-speaking fans and critics the original texts with these first-ever English-language translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The novellas reveal valuable insights into Kayama’s vision for the Godzilla story, feature plots that differ from the films, and clearly display the author’s strong antinuclear, proenvironmental convictions. Kayama’s fiction depicts Godzilla as engaging in guerrilla-style warfare against humanity, which has allowed the destruction of the natural world through its irresponsible, immoral perversion of science. As human activity continues to cause mass extinctions and rapid climatic change, Godzilla provides a fable for the Anthropocene, powerfully reminding us that nature will fight back against humanity’s onslaught in unpredictable and devastating ways. Shigeru Kayama (1904–1975) was a science fiction writer and scenarist whose early stories about monsters and mutated sea creatures attracted the attention of Tōhō Studios, which asked him to draft the first two Godzilla films. Jeffrey Angles is professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (Minnesota, 2011) and the award-winning translator of Orikuchi Shinobu’s The Book of the Dead (Minnesota, 2017) and Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller. 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 and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices 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

To mark the publication of John's book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press (2023), John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin's "speculative anthropology," gender politics, and goats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Em X. Liu’s The Death I Gave Him (Solaris, 2023) brings a science fiction twist to Shakespeare’s beloved Hamlet. Working at Elsinore Labs, Hayden Lichfield and his father are in relentless pursuit of the cure for mortality. The night of Hayden’s breakthrough should be cause for celebration until he finds his father murdered. As he flees with the research, his uncle puts Elsinore Labs on lockdown. Trapped inside with only 4 other people, old secrets, alliances, and lies are revealed. When the murderer starts to look like Hayden, he leans on his only ally, the laboratory’s AI, Horatio. “The inception of the novel really came from retelling or receiving Hamlet in this specific way.” says Liu, “It's kind of a murder mystery, kind of an emotional thriller. Ultimately, I would really describe it as a character study. “ Liu is keenly aware that playing with a Hamlet story means surprising both readers who are familiar with Hamlet or those who are not. This locked-room thriller is one that keeps the reader guessing. Em X. Liu is a writer and recent biochemistry graduate, which means they love stories about artificial intelligence and Shakespeare in equal measure. Since immigrating to Canada, they never go long without hopping on a plane to wander new places. But out of all the cities they've been to, they still love their home in Toronto the most. Brenda Noiseux hosts 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 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 Read the episode 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

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'd just as soon stab you in the back as 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

The Archive Undying (Tordotcom, 2023) is Emma Mieko Candon’s ambitious epic science fiction novel about intertwined human survivors following the violent fall of cities run by AI entities so massive, they had the power and influence of gods. When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. But in its final death throes, the god brought one thing back to life: Sunai. For twenty years, Sunai has been unable to die, unable to age, and unable to forget the horrors he’s experienced. He’s run as far as he can from the wreckage of his faith, drowning himself in drink, drugs, and men. But when Sunai wakes up in the bed of the one man he never should have slept with, he finds himself on a path straight back into the world of gods and machines. There’s a lot to unpack and it may sound all doom and gloom, but not to worry. Says Candon, “Welcome to your protagonist. I hope you have fun. He's at least funny about it.” The Archive Undying evokes a relatable trajectory and fresh take on what artificial general intelligence could look like, the beauty it could create, and havoc it could cause. Emma Mieko Candon is a queer author and escaped academic drawn to tales of devouring ghosts, cursed linguistics, and mediocre robots. Her work includes Star Wars Visions: Ronin, a Japanese reimagining of the Star Wars mythos, and The Archive Undying (2023), an original speculative novel about sad giant robots and fraught queer romance. As an actual cyborg whose blood has been taken for science, Emma’s grateful to be stationed at home in Hawaii, where they were born and raised as a fourth-generation Japanese settler. By day, they edit anime nonsense for Seven Seas Entertain­ment, and by night they remain academically haunted by identity, ideology, and imperialism. At all hours of the day, they are beholden to the whims of two lopsided cats and relieved by the support of an enviably hand­some wife. Brenda Noiseux hosts 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

Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future. The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species of octopus has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture. The marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them. She travels to the islands to join DIANIMA’s team: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first (and possibly last) android. The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. As Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves. But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. Or what they might do about it. A near-future thriller, a meditation on the nature of consciousness, and an eco-logical call to arms, Ray Nayler’s dazzling literary debut The Mountain in the Sea (MCD, 2022) is a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy. As promised in the episode, below is the list of some of the philosophers that inspired Nayler while writing The Mountain in the Sea: Kaja Silverman Jesper Hoffmayer Eva Jablonka Terrence Deacon Carlo Rovelli  Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Gareth L. Powell’s Descendant Machine (Titan Books, 2023) is set about 200 years in the future, and yet the recent explosion in A.I. technology suggests Powell’s imagined future—in which the minds of humans and A.I.s are symbiotically enmeshed—is just around the corner. The Bristol author’s new novel centers around a mysterious machine called the Grand Mechanism, an impenetrable black sphere, which, about two thousand years ago, replaced a star in a binary system. The system is home to a humanoid, multi-armed species known as the Jzat, who are divided among those who want to crack open the Grand Mechanism, believing it contains a wormhole to connect them with a more advanced Jzat civilization, and those who want to leave the mechanism alone, fearing it contains a black hole or other existential danger. “I got a bit satirical with the way the faction is appealing to nationalism to get the power they need to open this thing by promising sunlit uplands and making Jzat great again,” Powell says. “It's like any scientific experiment, any scientific knowledge that sentient beings see. It’s a process of just poking stuff to see what happens. Chimpanzees do it, and crows do it. You find something you don't understand, you poke it and try and break it and see what it can do. And that's how we learn. And that's what's basically happening on a massive scale in this story with this ancient machine that nobody knows what it does, but they want to poke it and see what happens.” Powell is known for using fast-paced, character-driven science fiction to explore big ideas and themes of identity, loss, and the human condition. He has twice won the coveted British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel and has become one of the most-shortlisted authors in the 50-year history of the award, as well as being a finalist for the Locus, British Fantasy, Seiun, and Canopus awards. 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 Brad Kelly about his novel House of Sleep (2021). A cerebral PsyFi thriller that will break your heart and then set it free. Think Chuck Palahniuk with soul, supernatural Don DeLillo, occult Murakami, edgy Atwood. At an exquisite mansion perched on an edenic plateau, twenty-some guests are remembering their dreams as clearly as yesterday. All that's required is to let an eccentric guru called the Diving Man work their subconscious like a snake-charmer. Parts Willy Wonka, Judge Holden, and Tim Leary, he seems to know what can't be known, professes a bizarre philosophy, and spends his days leaping from the cliffs to hold his breath for minutes on end in the churning river below. He is also plotting against the dissolution of the world. The House draws Lynn, an anxious, earnest therapist who foresaw her fiancé's death in a dream . . . or, just maybe, called it into being. This is her last chance to heal, but only if she can come to terms with her dark connection to another seeker—the young logophile Daniel, who is afflicted with a strange disease inextricable from an even stranger gift. Kendall Dinniene is a fourth year English PhD student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Leslye Penelope’s latest novel, The Monsters We Defy (Redhook, 2022), takes readers to a version of 1920s Washington D.C. where bootleggers, powerful spirits, and humans blessed (and burdened) with enchantments engage in an epic battle over peoples’ destinies. Penelope’s protagonist, Clara Johnson, is based upon a real person—a woman who, as a teenager during the Red Summer race riots of 1919 shot and killed a police detective after he broke down her bedroom door. Prohibited from arguing self-defense, she was convicted of manslaughter, but a judge later tossed out the verdict. Penelope found the real Johnson’s exoneration so remarkable that she felt “it had to be magic.” As she puts it, “How did this young Black girl get out of that situation? If magic was involved, that would make so much more sense.” The book’s magical elements are layered over D.C.’s dynamic Black community, where Black entrepreneurs, artists and academics thrive even as they face racism that is both overt (the Ku Klux Klan holds a demonstration) and systemic (Woodrow Wilson had segregated the federal workforce a few years earlier). The magic echoes the hope and horror of the real world, providing Penelope’s characters with the power to save themselves and their community—but at a painful price. Leslye Penelope is an award-winning author of fantasy and paranormal romance. Her debut novel, Song of Blood & Stone, was chosen as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. The novel also won the inaugural award for Best Self-Published Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family. So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse. Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America. Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, published March 21, 2023 in the US and UK from Melville House.,His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, LitHub, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. He received the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Fiction from The Southern Review and a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart Prize anthology. He received an MFA from Columbia University and is an editorial assistant at One Story. Recommended Books: Julia Bartz, Writing Retreat Gina Chung, Sea Change Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. 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 Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s science fiction novel, The Ten Percent Thief (Solaris, 2023), is set in a world centered on meritocracy, where everyone is judged on the Bell Curve. Apex City, formerly Bangalore, divides its population into the Virtual and Analog societies where access to technology earns a stark difference in quality of life. With the right image, values and opinions, citizens can ascend to the glittering heights of the Twenty Percent, the Virtual elite, they’re the movers and shakers with access to the best technology and thus the best quality of life. The risk of falling to the Ten Percent looms in most citizens’ minds with its threat of deportation to the Analog society where there is no access to electricity and running water, and limited access to humanity. Told through the over 20 perspectives, the mosaic novel explores a future trajectory based on our current relationship with technology. Though the book was written prior to the covid 19 pandemic, Lakshminarayan noticed that during the pandemic “the lines between privilege were even starker.” She says, “that was actually really heartbreaking for me. I didn't expect that a lot of the more extreme disparities that I portray in the novel would feel so real in such an extreme way so soon.” The novel was first released in South Asia to critical acclaim and is now making its debut in the U.S. and U.K. Lavanya Lakshminarayan is the author of Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future. She is a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the Times of India AutHer Award and the Valley of Words Award, both prestigious literary awards in India, and her work has been longlisted for a BSFA Award. She’s occasionally a game designer, and has built worlds for Zynga Inc.’s FarmVille franchise, Mafia Wars, and other games. She lives in India, and is currently working on her next novel. Brenda Noiseux hosts 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

Denise Crittendon’s debut science fiction novel,Where it Rains in Color (Angry Robot, 2022), is set far in the future, long after the Earth has been destroyed, on the planet of Swazembi. Swazembi is a color-rich utopia and famous vacation center of the Milky Way. No one is used to serious trouble in this idyllic, peace-loving world, least of all the Rare Indigo. But Lileala’s perfect, pampered lifestyle is about to be shattered. Published on the cusp of Crittendon’s 70th birthday, the novel’s creation was decades in the making. Ideas were jotted down and relegated to a drawer while her work as a journalist and ghostwriter took front seat. Inspiration was gathered from her time in Zimbabwe and a recurring dream she had over many years. “The dream influenced the novel a great deal,” says Crittendon. “The novel was kind of built around the dream. When I finally started writing it again, then the dreams came back. And then I stopped and the dreams went away. When I finally got a chance to do that final push, I never had a dream again.” That experience layers an almost metaphysical presence to a story that already includes a different kind of worldbuilding from what we normally see in science fiction. From Swazembi’s galaxy-renowned wind-force public transit system and nuanced cultural greeting of “waves of joy” to the noted lack of violence throughout, the novel offers a fresh perspective on what sci fi can be. Before making the big leap into the world of sci-fi & fantasy, Denise Crittendon held a string of journalism jobs. In addition to being a staff writer for The Detroit News and The Kansas City Star, she was editor-in-chief of the NAACP’s national magazine, The Crisis. Later, she became founding editor of a Michigan-based lifestyle publication for black families. After self-publishing two manuals that empower youth, “Girl in the Mirror, A Teen’s Guide to Self-Awareness” and “Life is a Party That Comes with Exams,” she entered the new-age healing movement as a motivational speaker for teens. These days, she fulfills ghostwriting assignments for clients and writes speculative fiction on the side. She divides her time between Spring Valley, Nevada and her hometown, Detroit, Mich. Brenda Noiseux and 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

In their new novel, The Terraformers (Tor Books, 2023), Annalee Newitz leaps 60,000 years into the future, redefining ideas of peoplehood, democracy and love A diverse array of characters—hominids, animals, and objects that in 2023 are still considered inanimate, such as doors and trains—are “people” in this multi-generational story about a corporation terraforming their privately-held planet Sask-E and their workers (which the corporation owns as part of their “proprietary ecosystem development kit,”) who want to turn Sask-E into a public, democratically-governed territory. The plot tracks the nitty-gritty of building complex things—environments, relationships, governments—as Sask-E evolves over thousands of years into a pseudo replica of Pleistocene Earth. Newitz’s heroes are members of the Environmental Rescue Team, an interplanetary force of first responders and environmental engineers who keep ecosystems in balance and stage disaster rescues. Apart from a fanciful invention called a “gravity mesh,” which allows some characters to fly, Newitz—who is also an award-winning writer of non-fiction—grounded the story in science. “I really did try to have a very grounded, scientifically accurate approach to ecosystems. For example, when Destry, my network analyst, connects to the environment, she has these sensors in her hands, which allow her to read a vast sensor network all over the planet. The Environmental Rescue Team has scattered these tiny, microscopic biodegradable sensors so that they can read the health of the trees, soil, insects, everything. So it gives Destry this almost magical connection to the planet Avatar-style, except it's not some hokey Tree-of-Life thing. It's just a sensor network, much like sensor networks that we're developing now on Earth and using in a lot of places.” Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. They’re also the author of the novels The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a journalist, they are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They are also the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. But lately it is The Ministry for the Future, his "science fiction nonfiction novel" (Jonathan Lethem) that has politicians, Eurocrats and the rest of us pondering how policy might fight climate change. In this Books in Dark Times conversation from the RTB vaults (you can also read a longer version that appeared as an article in our partner Public Books) Stan and John start out with Stan’s emerging from the Grand Canyon into the pandemic moment of late March, 2020. Then they discuss Stan’s sense that SF is the realism of the day and his take on “cognitive estrangement.” Finally, they happen upon a shared admiration for the great epic SF poet, Frederick Turner. Small fact connecting him to RTB-land: he completed a literature PhD directed by Frederic Jameson with a dissertation-turned-book on the novels of Phillip K. Dick. Mentioned in the Episode George Stewart, “Earth Abides“ Mary Shelley, “The Last Man“ M. P. Shiel, “The Purple Cloud“ John Clute, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (on “fantastika”) Frederick Turner, “Genesis” and “Apocalypse“ Ursula Le Guin, “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974; KSR praises such works as this for “power of poetry alone”) Darko Suvin, “Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre ” (1979; on cognitive estrangement) “The door dilated” a quote from Robert A. Heinlein in “Beyond This Horizon” Read the transcript 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

“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/adchoices Support 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

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

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. Read the transcript 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

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 sh*t. 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 sh*t (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

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