David B. Coe just finished a busy year in which he published three novels, two of which we discuss in this episode of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. His Father’s Eyes (Baen, 2015) is the second book (the first, Spell Blind, was also published in 2015) to follow the adventures of P.I. Justis Fearsson, a weremyste whose investigations are interrupted once a month during the full moon when he slips into psychosis. Dead Man’s Reach (Tor, 2015) written under the pen name D.B. Jackson, is t...
Jan 05, 2016•30 min
Katherine Addison‘s The Goblin Emperor has earned what might be termed a fantasy Grand Slam: the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and nominations for the Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy awards. To make her achievement even more noteworthy, Addison, like Maia, the royal goblin at the heart of the book, is herself a fiction. The pseudonym was created by author Sarah Monette to satisfy the demands of the publishing industry. As she explains in our interview, her real name had become a “deal-breake...
Nov 08, 2015•43 min
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 ...
Oct 05, 2015•36 min
What do the jobs of opera singer, lawyer and science fiction writer have in common? Answer: Melinda Snodgrass. The author of the just published Edge of Dawn‘s first ambition was to sing opera. But after studying opera in Vienna, she came to the conclusion that “I had a nice voice, [but] I didn’t have a world-class voice.” She then went to law school and worked for several years as a lawyer. Unfortunately, “I loved the law but I didn’t love lawyers,” she explains on New Books in Science Fiction a...
Sep 04, 2015•31 min
For his second novel, James L. Cambias chose one of the most challenging settings for a science fiction writer: the near future. Unlike speculative fiction that leaps centuries or millennia ahead or takes place on other planets, a book about the near future presents a world that varies only incrementally from the present. The risk, of course, is that the author’s vision will all-too-quickly be proven wrong. In his New Books interview, Cambias explains why he was drawn to the near future and how ...
Aug 17, 2015•41 min
There’s far more to Swedish literature than Pippi Longstocking and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That’s the message Anna Jakobsson Lund and Oskar Kallner are trying to send the English-speaking world through their contributions to Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep (Affront Publishing, 2015), a collection of short stories by Swedish authors. Until recently, the world of science fiction in Sweden was so small that it was possible to keep up with everything that was published. But no more....
Jul 31, 2015•1 hr 3 min
Porochista Khakpour moved to an apartment with large picture windows in downtown Manhattan shortly before September 11, 2001, giving her a painfully perfect view of the terrorist attacks. “The big event of my life was of course 9/11,” Khakpour says. “I experienced a lot of post traumatic stress from it and think about it constantly.” It’s no surprise that the assault on the Twin Towers features prominently in her writing. Through non-fiction essays and two novels, the Iranian-born writer has tri...
Jul 17, 2015•34 min
Ferrett Steinmetz first built an audience as a blogger, penning provocative essays about “puns, politics and polyamory” (among other things) with titles like “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex” and “How Kids React To My Pretty Princess Nails.” In recent years, he has drawn accolades as an author of speculative fiction, writing short stories and earning a Nebula nomination in 2011 for his novelette Sauerkraut Station. And now he is exploring new waters with the publication of his first n...
Jun 23, 2015•36 min
Despite the odds, Meg Elison did it. First, she finished the book she wanted to write. Second, she found a publisher–without an agent. Third, she won the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, a stunning achievement for a first-time author with a small, independent press. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (Sybaritic Press, 2014) is set in the American West after an epidemic has killed all but a fraction of humanity. Among the survivors, men vastly outnumber women, setting in motio...
Jun 07, 2015•26 min
Short story writing, novel writing, and translating require a variety of skills and strengths that are hardly ever found in a single person. Ken Liu is one of those rare individuals who has them all. He is perhaps best known for short stories like The Paper Menagerie, which (according to his Wikipedia entry) was the first work of fiction to earn Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. But this year he’s making waves with two longer projects, which are the focus of his New Books interview: his tr...
Jun 02, 2015•42 min
When an author creates a character, she can churn through as many re-writes as she’d like until she gets it right. This, of course, is in stark contrast to reality, where people get only one shot. There’s no going back, no do-overs, only an inexorable march to the end. But what if life were different? Catherine Webb, under the pen name Claire North, offers two worlds where this is possible. In The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), she introduces the reader to kalachakra, people who are...
Apr 28, 2015•35 min
While there are many well known cult television shows still revered by fans, MST3K continues to have an incredibly large following with a thriving following 25 years after its final episode. Chris Morgan‘s book The Comic Galaxy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (McFarland, 2015) looks at the films used by the cast and crew to present their comedy. He discusses his love of the show and the importance of the movies riffed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our sh...
Apr 17, 2015•54 min
Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live. Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, first by her teachers at Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine, wher...
Mar 30, 2015•38 min
While science fiction often seeks to imagine the impact of new science on the future, Rod Duncan explores an opposite: what happens when science remains frozen in the past. In The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter‘s alternate history, the Luddites prevailed in their protests 200 years ago against labor-replacing machinery, leaving science and culture stuck for generations in a Victorian-like age. Against this backdrop, Duncan introduces Elizabeth Barnabus, who outmaneuvers the restrictions placed on her...
Mar 04, 2015•39 min
It’s no surprise that when scientists in Ben H. Winters‘ The Last Policeman series declare that a 6.5-mile asteroid is going to destroy life as we know it on October 3, civilization starts to unravel. Governments collapse. People quit their jobs and abandon their families. Survivalists stock up on guns and food, imagining there’s a way to outsmart the impending holocaust. Fatalists sink into hedonism, depression or suicide. And then there’s Hank Palace, a detective on the Concord, N.H., police f...
Feb 03, 2015•31 min
Kameron Hurley has been honored for her mastery of numerous forms. Her first novel, God’s War, earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. Her essay “We Have Always Fought”–about the history of women in conflict–was the first blog post ever to win a Hugo Award. And although her tweets haven’t won awards (yet), she is also an animated and articulate presence on Twitter. Hurley has lived with some of the concepts and characters in her newest ...
Jan 05, 2015•33 min
This week’s podcast was an experiment. Rather than record the conversation with author Alex London over Skype, I decided to take the subway to Brooklyn and meet with him face-to-face in a coffee shop. I found it liberating to be unchained from an Internet connection, which has been known to fail mid-conversation, but the price of having a barista nearby is boisterous background noise. London’s novels about class conflict, debt, and rebellion are set in a grim future. A significant portion of Pro...
Dec 09, 2014•37 min
Astronomy and astrology once went hand in hand: people studied the location and motion of celestial bodies in order to make astrological predictions. In the seventeenth century, the paths of these two disciplines forked so that today astronomy is a well-established science while astrology is allowed only as close to the word “science” as the suffix “pseudo-” allows. Lydia Netzer, in How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), tries to turn back the clock, inventing a world ...
Nov 21, 2014•43 min
Before Apollo 11, there was Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon. Before the Internet, there was Mark Twain’s short story From the ‘London Times’ of 1904. In other words, before the appearance of many spectacular technologies, a writer imagined it first. This truth underscores one of science fiction’s abiding strengths: its ability to test concepts, both technological and social, without spending vast sums on research and development. The editors and writers behind Hieroglyph: Stories ...
Nov 05, 2014•31 min
What does it take to be an emperor? That question is at the heart of Brian Staveley‘s debut novel The Emperor’s Blades (Tor, 2014). In this first of a projected trilogy, Staveley focuses on three siblings. They are the children of the assassinated emperor of Annur, a descendant of the Goddess of Fire whose irises look like flames. Kaden, the designated heir, has spent the last eight years training in far off mountains with monks. He’s physically strong and he’s learned to withstand deprivation. ...
Oct 21, 2014•42 min
Science Fiction: 101 (Roc, 2014) isn’t just an “exploration of the craft of science fiction” as its subtitle says; it’s also about the impact the stories in this anthology had on the imagination of a young boy. That boy was Robert Silverberg, who was so inspired by the stories he found in pulpy magazines with names like Startling and Thrilling Wonder that he vowed he would one day become a science fiction writer himself. He sold his first science fiction story in 1954 when he was a sophomore at ...
Oct 07, 2014•30 min
Full Fathom Five (Tor, 2014) the third and most recent novel in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, features dying divinities and depositions, idols and investments, priestesses and poets, offerings to gods and options for shareholders. As he explains in the podcast, Gladstone traces his initial inspiration for his Craft Sequence to, among other things, his several years teaching English in rural China, where he saw children of subsistence farmers grow up to become engineers and international banker...
Sep 22, 2014•37 min
Strand a man on Mars with only a fraction of the supplies he needs to survive and what do you get? A bestseller. Andy Weir‘s The Martian (Crown, 2014) has been on a journey almost as remarkable as its protagonist, but instead of surviving on an airless, waterless planet, The Martian has survived the inhospitable environment known as publishing, floating near the top of bestseller lists since the moment it was published. The overall plot is easy to summarize: A manned mission to Mars is scheduled...
Sep 06, 2014•32 min
History is shaped by cultures interacting either peacefully (through trade or art, for example) or violently, through war or colonialism. There doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid cultural intermixing–on Earth, at least. Science fiction is another story. The crew of Star Trek was bound by the Prime Directive, the United Federation of Planets’ regulation that prohibited Starfleet personnel from interfering in the development of alien societies. James L. Cambias explores a similar idea in A Darkli...
Aug 19, 2014•29 min
It wasn’t until Shelbi Wescott was deep into her career as a high school teacher that she published her first novel, Virulent: The Release (Arthur Press, 2013). The inspiration for the story came during a class for students who weren’t reading at grade level. “Part of my job in that class is to get students excited about literature,” she says. But one student remained disengaged despite her best efforts: I had to call him after class one day and say ‘You actually have to give some of these books...
Aug 04, 2014•30 min
It’s clear to most scientists that human activity fuels climate change. What’s less clear is global warming’s long-term impact on geography, ecosystems and human society. If global warming continues at its current pace, what will life be like 50 years from now? A hundred? Five hundred? The further in the future we go, the more we must rely on science fiction writers to help us fill in the details. In her debut novel Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta takes us to a future where the defining consequen...
Jul 22, 2014•30 min
Southern California can seem magical, thanks to sunny skies, warm weather, orange groves and movie stars. In Greg van Eekhout‘s California Bones (Tor Books, 2014) the magic is real. The Kingdom of Southern California is ruled by osteomancers who draw power and wealth from potions derived from the bones of magical creatures. In his conversation with Rob Wolf, the new host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eekhout discusses, among other things, his interest in myths and magic, the impac...
Jul 07, 2014•30 min
[Re-posted with permission from Wild About Math] I’ve admitted before that Physics and I have never gotten along. But, science fiction is something I enjoy. So, when Princeton University Press sent me a copy of Physics Professor Chuck Adler‘s new book Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction (Princeton University Press, 2014), I was intrigued enough that I wanted to interview the author. This interview rambled, but in a good way. Chuck is a great guest, he’...
Feb 14, 2014•1 hr 36 min
In this sequel to Zita the Spacegirl, Zita faces the perils of being a famous space hero. Ben Hatke once again combines whimsical and lovely drawings with a great sense of humor. Although I purchased Legends of Zita the Spacegirl (First Second, 2012) for my daughter, I think that I’ve re-read it nearly as many times as she has. For more information, check out E.C. Myers’ rave review of the series. In this podcast, Hatke discusses his training as an artist, the origins and development of the Zita...
Sep 02, 2013•56 min
Hugh C. Howey, author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga, is best known for his self-published and bestselling series Wool. This post apocalyptic tale of human survival within the infamous silos has taken the world by storm. The Wool Omnibus Edition (Simon and Schuster, 2012) won the Kindle Book Review’s 2012 Indie Book of the Year award, in addition to making the bestseller lists in both The New York Times and USA Today. In the two years since releasing a series he originally believed “no one...
Jul 17, 2013•40 min
