The massive corporation at the center of Eliot Peper’s Analog trilogy, which he completed last month with the publication of Breach (47North, 2019) is radically different from most science fictional companies. It aspires to do good. The growth of Commonwealth into a benevolent behemoth is chronicled in the series’ first two novels, Bandwidth and Borderless (which Peper discussed on the New Books Network last fall.) By the end of Borderless, Commonwealth, which controls the near-future version of...
Jul 04, 2019•45 min•Ep. 89
Vandana Singh has made a career of studying both hard science and the far corners of creativity. It’s no surprise then that Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2018), which was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award, reflects a fluency in multiple languages—not just English and Hindi, but the idioms of both particle physics and fantastical narratives that reach far beyond what science can (as of yet, at least) describe. “One of the things that really bothers me about how we thi...
Jun 20, 2019•42 min•Ep. 88
Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards (Europa Editions, 2018) uses a scientist’s relationship with bonobos—and her struggle to keep them alive following a civilization-shattering dust storm—to explore climate change, over-dependence on technology, and the challenge of a body that produces more pain than pleasure. The novel, which won this year’s Philip K. Dick Award and Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award from Dartmouth, was almost never written.. Despite the fact that her four previous books ha...
Jun 06, 2019•39 min•Ep. 87
Caitlin Starling’s debut The Luminous Dead (Harper Voyager, 2019) takes readers along with her young protagonist, Gyre Price, to a place few would voluntarily go—into a deep, pitch-dark cave inhabited by avalanche-inducing, rock-eating worms from which only one human being (among many) has emerged alive. Still, Gyre thinks the risk of scouting for minerals is worth it. Not only does the job pay extraordinarily well, but she’s wearing a state-of-the-art suit, which protects her from the cave’s po...
May 16, 2019•39 min•Ep. 86
In 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the Star Wars franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from near-certain extinction to the release of a new movie trilogy, two stand-alone films, and two animated series. In Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy(University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Dan Golding examines the current status of Star Wars, as well as the similarities and ...
May 13, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 16
Meg Elison’s The Book of Flora (47North, 2019) trilogy is as much about gender as it is about surviving the apocalypse. The first installment, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, set the tone with a pandemic that destroyed civilization, leaving behind 10 men for every woman. To avoid rape and enslavement in this male-dominated landscape, the eponymous midwife must present herself as a man to survive. In the next volume, The Books of Etta, set a century later, gender...
May 03, 2019•39 min•Ep. 85
Charlie Jane Anders’ The City in the Middle of the Night (Tor Books, 2019) is a coming of age story about Sophie, a young woman trying to forge her identity on a planet of rigid social classes, harsh climate and frightening aliens. Feeling hopelessly out of place, Sophie ventures where no human has gone before: into the half of the planet that's shrouded in perpetual night. There she befriends the native inhabitants, the Gelet; they’re fearsome tentacled creatures whom humans fear and hunt but w...
Apr 11, 2019•35 min•Ep. 84
Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, 2019) takes us deep into the heart of an alien invasion that divides humans among those who welcome the extra-terrestrials and those who want to stop them. The book is the second in Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy. The first, Rosewater, earned the inaugural Nommo Award for Best Novel, Africa’s first-ever prize for speculative fiction. In most alien invasion stories, mankind and the invaders battle to the death. In Thompson’s tale, however, there is ...
Mar 21, 2019•49 min•Ep. 83
Mike Chen’s debut novel Here and Now and Then (MIRA, 2019) is a portrait of patience. The main character, Kin Stewart, waits 18 years for his employer to retrieve him from an assignment. Then, after being rescued, he needs many months to re-acclimate to his old life. Those waits, however, are nothing compared to how long it takes him to re-connect with the daughter he is forced to abandon: more than 120 years. Stewart, of course, has no ordinary job. He’s an agent from the year 2142, employed by...
Mar 07, 2019•37 min•Ep. 82
James Rollins’ books are usually categorized as thrillers, but most of them could easily be labeled science fiction. An instant bestseller, his latest novel, Crucible, is no exception, revolving around the effort to control Eve, an artificial super-intelligence. On one side of the conflict is a secret sect, the Crucibulum. The spiritual descendents of the Spanish Inquisition, the members of the Crucibulum consider female scientists—like Eve’s inventor, Mara Silviera, a Portuguese graduate studen...
Feb 18, 2019•42 min•Ep. 81
Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World (G.P. Putnam Son's, 2018) tells the story of Navy investigator Shannon Moss, who travels to the future to solve present-day crimes. The book opens with a brutal murder and a search for a missing girl, and maintains the pace of a chilling page-turner. But Sweterlitsch’s second novel is also an exploration of questions about consciousness, identity, and reality. The idea of using time travel to solve crimes emerged from a conversation the author had with his broth...
Jan 30, 2019•39 min•Ep. 80
The Eurovision Song Contest has launched careers (think ABBA and Celine Dion), inspired outrageous costumes, and generated spinoffs. The campy competition also led a fan to dare author Catherynne M. Valente on Twitter to create a science fictional Eurovision, resulting in the publication of Space Opera (Saga Press, 2018) two years later. Shunning science fiction’s typical seriousness, Space Opera strives to be as ridiculous—and funny—as possible. “You can’t play ‘Eurovision in space’ straight,” ...
Jan 17, 2019•45 min•Ep. 79
The pandemic in Peng Shepherd’s debut novel, The Book of M, starts with magic—the disappearance of a man’s shadow. The occurrence, broadcast worldwide, is greeted with delight until more and more people lose their shadows. People start losing their memories as well—while gaining an ability to change the world with the power of their imaginations. As society collapses, the landscape becomes as beautiful as it is terrifying: deers have wings, clouds tinkle like bells, lakes appear overnight, flowe...
Jan 03, 2019•25 min•Ep. 78
Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (Delphinium Books, 2018) is set in a near-future Pakistan where a repressive patriarchy requires women to take multiple husbands and become full-time baby makers after wars and disease render women devastatingly scarce. A reviewer in the Los Angeles Times called it a “thrilling novel” with “exquisite” social commentary. Before She Sleeps was also among the books recently highlighted in an article in The Atlanticabout “The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia.” B...
Dec 20, 2018•32 min•Ep. 77
Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding is the first comprehensive biography of John W. Campbell, who, as a writer and magazine editor, wielded enormous influence over the field of science fiction in the mid-20th century. “His interests, his obsessions, and his prejudices shaped what science fiction was going to be,” Nevala-Lee says. Many people are familiar with Campbell’s name because it’s on the award given out every year by the World Science Fiction Society—the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Write...
Nov 29, 2018•44 min•Ep. 76
Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to be a bat, or a dog, a robot, a tree, a human being, a rock, a star, a neutrino? Discognition looks at a series of fascinating science fiction narratives – in some cases reading philosophical or scientific literature as speculative fiction – to raise important questions about consciousness and sent...
Nov 20, 2018•1 hr 8 min
It seems clear that our dependence on the internet will only grow in coming years, offering untold convenience. But how much control will we have to surrender to access this digital wonderland? That’s one of the key questions animating the first two books in Eliot Peper’s action- and idea-packed Analog trilogy. In the first book, Bandwidth, which came out in May, a single company called Commonwealth controls the digital feed for most of the world. To imagine its power, Peper says, picture all of...
Nov 15, 2018•42 min
In Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga Press, 2017), John Crowley provides an account of human history through the eyes of a crow. The story takes flight in the Iron Age, when the eponymous main character, Dar Oakley, is the first of his kind to encounter humans. He finds these upright beings (who hail from a realm that Dar Oakley calls “Ymr” in crow-speak) both fascinating and baffling. Witnessing a battle for the first time, Dar Oakley can’t make sense of it. In his experience, animals kil...
Nov 01, 2018•43 min
Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future. Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds. Th...
Oct 18, 2018•41 min
In Karin Tidbeck‘s Amatka (Vintage, 2017), words weave—and have the potential to shred—the fabric of reality. Amatka was shortlisted for the Compton Crook and Locus Awards. A reviewer on NPR called it “a warped and chilling portrait of post-truth reality” while a Chicago Tribune reviewer called it “disturbing and provocative.” The book’s title takes its name from a colony settled at an unspecified point in the past by pioneers. Life there is hard; not only is it always maddeningly cold, but a pa...
Oct 04, 2018•36 min
In Trail of Lightning (Saga Press, 2018), the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Rebecca Roanhorse draws on Navajo culture and history to tell a gripping future-fable about gods and monsters. The book launches The Sixth World, a planned four-part series set in the near future. The series title refers to the Navajo origin story, which says that our current world—the fifth—emerged after floods destroyed the previous ones. In Trail of Lightning, the six world is wrought from similar devastation, ...
Sep 20, 2018•32 min
Humans might one day escape Earth, but escaping our biases may prove much harder. That’s one of the lessons from Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic Books, 2017) set on the HSS Matilda, a massive generation starship where the nightmare of slavery persists hundreds of years after humans have fled their dying planet. At the center of Solomon’s masterful debut is Aster, a young woman trying to figure out why her mother apparently killed herself shortly after giving birth to her 25 yea...
Aug 30, 2018•40 min
For Inspector J.P. Dillal, the main protagonist in K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit (Pyr, 2018), the expression “I’ve got a lot on my mind” takes on new meaning when he allows his bosses to replace a good chunk of his brain with a mobile crime lab. What he gets in exchange for submitting to the risky surgery is a promotion that allows him to catapult to the top ranks of the Gattis Corporation’s police force. The life circumstances that lead Dillal to surrender part of his body is as much a part of...
Aug 16, 2018•38 min
The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it teach itself, change its programming, become independent? Can it outfox its human inventors, be guided by self-interest, have feelings? While companies like Google and Facebook are competing to develop A.I. technology, science fiction writers are light years ahead of them, finding answers to these questions in their imaginations. One of the m...
Aug 02, 2018•35 min
Sam J. Miller loves cities. He lives in one, has a day job dedicated to making urban life more humane and fair, and has set his new novel, Blackfish City (Ecco, 2018), in a teeming metropolis full of people who are grateful to be there. The fictional metropolis is Qaanaak, which floats in arctic waters like a massive 8-armed asterisk and serves as a refuge for those fleeing climate change, resource scarcity and war. Like Miller’s hometown of New York City, the book is packed with diverse charact...
Jul 19, 2018•39 min
If Tolstoy had written Spoonbenders (Knopf, 2017), he might have started it: “All happy families are alike; each family of psychics is unhappy in its own way.” Then again, who needs Tolstoy when you have Daryl Gregory, whose masterful family drama is tied together with telekinesis, astral traveling, and genuine mindreading magic. A Nebula Award finalist and an NPR Best Book for 2017, Spoonbenders tells the story of the one-time Amazing Telemachus Family, who have struggled to make ends meet ever...
Jul 05, 2018•31 min
Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male (Harper Voyager, 2017) is a work of science fiction inspired by a real-world dystopia: a country with tens of millions of “extra” men who will never find spouses. The country is China, which in 1979 adopted its one-child policy in the hope of reducing its population of 940 million to around 700 million. The plan was intended to last only one generation, but it endured until 2015. The degree to which the policy has contributed to a drop in China’s fertility rate ...
Jun 21, 2018•35 min
Jade City combines what its author, Fonda Lee, calls the 3 Ms: mafia, magic and martial arts. Lee’s talent for depicting complex characters struggling with both internal and external conflicts earned Jade City nominations for the Nebula and Locus Awards. The book is her first written for adults. (Her previous books, Exo and Zeroboxer, were written for young adults and both were shortlisted for the Andre Norton Award). Set in the fictional post-colonial nation of Kekon, Jade City (Orbit, 2017) in...
Jun 08, 2018•37 min
The technological “singularity” is a popular topic among futurists, transhumanists, philosophers, and, of course, science fiction writers. The term refers to that hypothetical moment when an artificial superintelligence surpasses human intelligence, leading to runaway—and unpredictable—advances in technology. Among the biggest unknowns is whether or not the superintelligence will turn out to be benign of malevolent. “All sorts of visions arise, one of which might be the total annihilation of hum...
May 24, 2018•38 min
Jack Chen is a drug pirate, illegally fabricating patented pharmaceuticals in an underground lab. But when she discovers a deadly flaw in Big Pharma’s new productivity pill, corporate bosses hire a team of assassins to silence her. Annalee Newitz’s novel Autonomous (Tor, 2017) isn’t only a fast-paced cat-and-mouse story. It’s also an exploration of the rapaciousness of capitalism and its ability to turn everything, even freedom, into a commodity. Her first novel, Autonomous has been widely accla...
May 10, 2018•35 min
