Enlightenment meets traffic jams in Zen City

"The future begins with a traffic jam."

This is how Eliot Fintushel described to me the setting of Zen City (Zero Books, 2016), his science fiction novel about the obstacles encountered along the path to spiritual fulfillment, when I interviewed him on the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction.

In Fintushel's book, the quest for enlightenment manifests as a physical journey as his protagonist, Big Man, makes his way from an eternal traffic jam (in which people have been rooted so long on a highway exit ramp that they've created cults around their Econoline vans and Chevrolet Chevelles) to the City, where those who have achieved true enlightenment are literally merged into a single body-consciousness that transcends reality as we know it.

More than a commentary on Buddhism, the story is a meditation on religion and the challenge of using "robes and rituals" to find enlightenment, Fintushel explains. The problem is when enlightenment itself becomes a sign of status, he says, undermining the goal of enlightenment, which is supposedly a state of "no status."

Fintushel's adventure is both poetic and funny, meditating on language as much as belief. He is playing with the "limits of identifying things," evoking the viewpoint of a baby. "If you watch a baby's eyes moving around, they don't fix on objects or even on people the way we do. They don't have categories of objects and people. And I'm assuming, for the sake of the fiction anyway, that that's more real than the reality of objects and things and people."

The Brexit Interview: Dave Hutchinson's Fictional Europe is Falling Apart but Don't Call Him Prescient

Don't call my latest guest on New Books in Science Fiction prescient. Even though Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe Sequence envisions a continent crumbling into ever-smaller countries, the idea that his homeland could Brexit the European Union hadn't occurred to him when he started writing Europe in Autumn.

The book chronicles the adventures of Rudi, an Estonian cook-turned-spy who discovers the existence of an alternate Europe, one in which the Eurasian continent has become a Brexiter's dream come true, a bucolic but boring England that extends from Spain to Siberia.

Its sequel, Europe at Midnight, isn't really a sequel but a spinoff, introducing new characters who explore the dark side of Europe's parallel universes. Both books are imaginative, elegant and unexpected, combining elements of thriller and science fiction. And there's more to come. A third book, Europe in Winter, is due out in November, and a fourth and final book, Europe at Dawn, is in the works.

I was fortunate to have Aubrey Fox (author of Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure) as a co-host for this interview. He not only recommended Hutchinson's books to me, but he's an avid fan of both science fiction and mysteries. Among the topics Hutchinson discussed with us were the ideas that inspired him to write Midnight in Autumn, the ups and downs of his long writing career, his decision to write a series when he'd set out to write only a single book, and, of course, the Brexit vote, which took place the day after our conversation.

Adam Rakunas Delivers Action, Environmentalism and Union Organizing in Windswept

My interview with Adam Rakunas, which was posted on the New Books Network today, is my fifth with the nominees for this year's Philip K. Dick Award. His novel, Windswept, is a sprawling and funny adventure that focuses on a very stressful few days in the life of Padma Mehta, a labor organizer turned action hero on a planet far far away.

Mehta is basically part Philip Marlow, part Norma Rae, part Jessica Jones as she manages the day-to-day machinations of helping run a blue-collar planet and simultaneously battling an interstellar corporate conspiracy.

Windswept is full of action, plot twists and humor. But that doesn’t mean it shies away from grappling with important issues, including a looming environmental disaster—specifically a crop-killing plague that threatens to destroy the monoculture crop that the entire universe depends on.

Just as Mehta jumped through numerous hoops to save her world, so did Rakunas to get Windswept published. After working on the novel for several years, he sent the manuscript to 65 agents, and was rejected by 64 of them. The wisdom of the 65^th to take him on was vindicated this past January, when Windswept was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Although it didn’t win top honors (which went to Ramez Nam, who will be featured in the next New Books in Science Fiction podcast), Rakunas is well on his way to establishing himself as a science fiction writer with a unique voice and vision.

Windswept’s sequel, Like a Boss, will be published June 7.

Marguerite Reed's Unconventional Hero Juggles Saving Her Planet with Daycare

Marguerite Reed’s Archangel (Arche Press, 2015) introduces a hero not often found at the center of science fiction: a mother, who takes cuddling responsibilities as seriously as she does the fate of her planet.

Of course, Vashti Loren plays many roles besides Mom. She’s also a hunter, a scientist, a tour guide and the widow of a revered early settler. But Reed spotlights her relationship with her toddler, offering a protagonist who’s not only good with a gun but manages to get her kid to daycare on time.

“So many protagonists, whether in science fiction or fantasy or adventure fiction or film are disconnected or separate or isolated from family ties, and I wanted to see if I could write something where people did have family ties, where they were connected, as we so often are in the real world,” Reed told me in her New Books interview.

When Loren discovers that a genetically-enhanced and potentially dangerous human soldier has been illegally smuggled onto the planet, she must decide whether he is friend or foe. The former means she can enlist his aid to protect her world, a lush colony faced with the threat of massive—and potentially destructive—immigration; the latter means she must kill him. Ultimately, like a number of books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, Reed takes readers on an adventure that explores what it means to be human.

Archangel was one of six books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award. It received a special citation on March 25 at Norwescon.

The winner of this year’s award is Apex by Ramez Nam; I hope to have Nam as a guest on the podcast in the coming weeks.

Podcast with Brenda Cooper

My interview with author and futurist Brenda Cooper is the second of my conversations with nominees for the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award.

Cooper’s novel Edge of Dark (Pyr, 2015) is set in a solar system where human are forced to confront a civilization they’d long ago banished: a race of super-beings who evolved from humans into cyborgs.

The idea of implanting human intelligence into an artificial body is not new. But Cooper gives it a fresh twist by making the ethics of human-robot blending the central theme of her book. The super-beings (called variously ice pirates and the Next) are returning uninvited from their banishment and, in addition to seeking access to natural resources, are offering immortality to anyone who wants it.

Cooper sees Edge of Dark as part of a conversation about the evolution of the human race. "I’m fascinated by transhumanism what we’re going to become," Cooper says. "I do think that we’re becoming something different… I’m exploring what the human soul might be about."

All six PDK-nominated authors participated in a joint podcast where they interview each other. It’s available here.

Podcast with Douglas Lain: 'I Think Therefore I'm an Alien'

I'm planning to interview on New Books in Science Fiction all six nominees for this year's Philip K. Dick Award. First up is Douglas Lain, whose After the Saucers Landed (Night Shade Books, 2015) is set in the early 1990s, when aliens, with the theatrical sense of B-movie directors, land flying saucers on the White House lawn.

At first, the visitors seem fit for a Las Vegas chorus line; they're tall, attractive and never leave their spaceships without donning sequined jumpsuits. Even the name of their leader–Ralph Reality–is marquee-ready.

But is Reality as real as he seems?

That's the question that Lain poses for readers and his first-person narrator, Brian Johnson, who confronts the alien invasion head-on when one of the interstellar travelers assumes the identity of his wife. This propels Johnson into an examination of reality through various prisms: popular culture, science, philosophy, art, and even fiction.

A kaleidoscope of personalities, artists and thinkers are name-checked as Johnson and his colleagues search for the ultimate truth. There are as many nods to mainstream culture (think Elvis Presley, Arsenio Hall and David Letterman) as there are to high-brow (e.g., René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Baudrillard). And topping it off are the writings of ufologists, including the work of one of the characters, Harold Flint, who is so disappointed by the aliens' tackiness that he decides to stop studying UFOs altogether.

"The big challenge is try and take sometimes abstract ideas and philosophical concepts and bring them to life in the story while not losing any of their complexity," Lain says. Far easier, he found, was conveying the narrator's sense of unease and growing paranoia as he learns more about the aliens. "I've spent far too much of my life in that kind of state, so it comes naturally me to write about that feeling."

Melinda Snodgrass pits science against religion in Edge of Dawn

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 in my interview with her on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Her first published books were romance novels, which taught her the "extremely valuable lesson of how to finish what you start. Because that actually is a real problem for people. They'll have brilliant ideas and write the first three chapters and they'll never finish."

Her first science fiction novels, the Circuit Trilogy, drew on her knowledge of the law as she chronicled the adventures of a federal court judge riding circuit in the solar system. She also collaborated with George R.R. Martin to create the shared world series Wild Cards.

It was Martin who encouraged her to write a spec script for Star Trek: The Next Generation. That spec script, inspired by the Dred Scott decision, turned into the episode The Measure of a Man, and a job as story editor for the series.

Her newest contribution to science fiction is Edge of Dawn, the third book in the saga of Richard Oort, who leads a team seeking to destroy beings from an alternate dimension that use religion to create strife on earth.
The trilogy is in large part a battle between science and religion.

"Science is all about doubt. It's about saying, 'is this real and how can I test it?' ... Religion is about the opposite thing entirely. It's about faith and acceptance of it without questioning, and I think that that can lead to very dangerous results and outcomes," Snodgrass says.

The idea for the series came to her New Year's Eve in 1999. "I thought to myself, why on the dawn of the 21st century are people putting more faith in guardian angels and crystal healing power and tarot card readings than they are in medicine and chemistry and science? ... Why are we seemingly going backwards and becoming more superstitious?" she says. "I cooked up this idea about these creatures encouraging us to believe in fairytales and to fear each other and hate each other on the basis of externalities like the color of our skin, or gender, religion all these different things."

Pirates! In Space! James L. Cambias embraces the near future in his second novel

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 my conversation with him on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Cambias explains why he was drawn to the near future and how he navigated those tricky shoals in the writing of Corsair, which follows space pirates as they hunt and plunder treasure (hydrogen mined on the moon) using remote-controlled spacecraft.

Cambias is certain that space piracy will come to pass. "I absolutely expect that some point that space piracy or space hacking... will become a criminal enterprise. Space hardware is just too valuable," he says.

Cambias also discusses the Hieroglyph Project, which is trying to get science fiction authors to write the kind of visionary fiction that has the capacity to spark brick-and-mortar innovation. Cambias contributed to the project's collection of short stories but also penned a series of blog posts in which he declares the project a "failure."

Related links:

• This is Cambias' second appearance on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. His first interview, about his book A Darkling Sea, is available here.
• An episode of New Books was also devoted to the Hieroglyph Project.

Follow host Rob Wolf on his blog or on Twitter @RobWolfBooks

An Author Who Blogs about Real Sex, Writes Novels about Fictional Magic, and is Named after a Rodent

One of the most surprising things I learned during my interview with Ferrett Steinmetz is that the blogger who writes candidly about his most intimate experiences--including his polyamory and struggles with depression--is also socially anxious. He predicted that after our conversation, he'd need a few hours of Clone Wars and solitude to recover.

Of course, I shouldn't be surprised that a writer is quirky. After all, I'm a writer and I'm kinda quirky. And I can be socially anxious too. But enough about me. Here's my summary of our conversation that I posted on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy:

Ferrett Steinmetz first built an audience as a blogger, penning provocative essays about "puns, politics and polyamory" (among other things) with titles like "Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex" and "How Kids React To My Pretty Princess Nails."

In recent years, he has drawn accolades as an author of speculative fiction, writing short stories and earning a Nebula nomination in 2011 for his novelette Sauerkraut Station.

And now he is exploring new waters with the publication of his first novel, Flex (Angry Robot, 2015), which tells the story of a father desperate enough to use illegal magic to heal his badly burned daughter.

The title refers to crystalized magic that, when snorted, gives the user the power to manipulate objects for which he or she has a particular affinity. Cat ladies become felinemancers. Weightlifters become musclemancers. Graphic artists become illustromancers. And the protagonist, a paper-pushing bureaucrat by the name of Paul Tsabo, becomes a bureaucromancer, able to turn paperwork (with the help of flex) into a magical beast.

The only problem is that with flex comes flux--a pushback from the universe that re-balances any magic act with disaster.

Below are highlights from Steinmetz's New Books interview.

On what he learned at Clarion Writers' Workshop:

"Bit by bit they kind of stripped away my illusions and showed me how lazy I'd been and how much more effort I had to put to make my stories top notch. ... I thought I was a one and a half draft person, but realistically I have to put in 5 drafts before the story starts to get good."

On how paperwork can become magical in Paul Tsabo's hands:

"He's basically useless in a firefight but can send a SWAT team through your door by dropping a magically completed warrant for your arrest on a cop's desk."

On why he why a world with flex also needs flux:

"Flux evens out the odds of magic.... I really hate novels where magic is this thing you can do ... without any kind of cost.... Frequently what I see is, 'Oh, I'm a magician. I'll raise an army of the dead and make my castle out of magic,' and where is any challenge in that for your characters? Where do they have any stopping points to what they can do?... A big tension in the book as to whether the mancers should even use their magic."

On his approach to writing:

"I'm what's called a gardener writer in the business. There are plotters who basically sit down and plot out all their books beat by beat and know their ending the minute they start their first sentence. And Flex, like every story I've ever written-- basically I wrote an interesting first paragraph and followed it randomly until the end of the book."

On 9/11 as an inspiration for Flex:

"To a large extent the magic system in Flex is driven by a reaction to 9/11, where something really bad happened--and yes it really was bad... but we really overreacted that wasn't helpful at all and in fact may have made it entirely worse for us."

Related links:

• Follow Ferrett Steinmetz on his blog or on Twitter.
• Follow host Rob Wolf on his blog or on Twitter @RobWolfBooks.

Meg Elison explores power and gender in Book of the Unnamed Midwife

I spoke with this year's winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, Meg Elison, for my 18th podcast on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. She was easy breezy to talk to, with smart quick answers that, in my humble opinion, made for a great interview. Of course, it helps that her book tackles all kinds of rich subjects: gender inequality (exacerbated by an epidemic that kills far more women than men), reproductive rights, and a need for meaningful emotional and intellectual stimulation in a world sorely lacking both. Below is what I wrote to introduce the podcast.

---

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 is set in the American West after an epidemic has killed all but a fraction of humanity. Among the survivors, men vastly outnumber women, setting in motion a desperate journey of survival for the eponymous midwife. To avoid the serial rape and enslavement that threatens all females in this male-dominated landscape, the midwife sheds her name and even her sexuality, presenting herself as a man and continuously changing her moniker to suit the circumstance.

Communication falls apart too quickly for anyone to even know the name or nature of the illness that's destroyed civilization and made childbirth a fatal event for female survivors. The midwife's focus is on giving the few women she meets the hard-won power to prevent pregnancy. "I think the thing I wanted to come across most strongly was to explode notions of gender... And to really think about what your options would be like if you, like your grandmother, had no control over when you had children or how or by whom," Elison says in her New Books interview.

Elison was raised on stories about the apocalypse--the fire and brimstone kind. "I grew up in some pretty crazy evangelical churches, and they hammered on us about the end of days and the Book of Revelation, and it gave me nightmares, and it made always think about the fact that the end was nigh and that it was going to be bad, and I think that stuck with me my whole life even though I shed the ideological parts of it."

For the midwife, the apocalypse poses threats both dramatic and mundane. When not searching for food and a safe place to spend the night, she must negotiate the frustrating reality of spending time with people she doesn't like. "I started thinking about what it would be like if the only people you could find were people you couldn't stand, if they just irritated in you every way," Elison says. "There's nothing wrong with them and they're not unsafe, you just don't like being there. So I wanted to make a character who had to make choices between feeling safe in a group of people and feeling pissed off all the time."

Elison is grateful for the editors at Sybaritic Press, who published her unagented manuscript. "They're very good editors and publishers," she says. But inevitably, she's had to do a lot of marketing herself. "It's good because I've learned a lot about the business doing that and it's not good because no one listens to a writer on her own."

Fortunately, the Philip K. Dick Award has made finding readers a whole lot easier. The award "has opened a lot of doors," she says.

Related links:

• An article in the Los Angeles Review of Books explores the book's treatment of "Gender and the Apocalypse." [Note: the article has spoilers].
• Meg Elison shares her thoughts on her blog.
• You can follow New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy on Twitter and Facebook
and host Rob Wolf on Twitter

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Podcast No. 16: An Imagination Too Big for One Life (or One Name)

When an author creates a character, she can churn through as many re-writes as she'd like until she gets it right. This, of course, is in stark contrast to reality, where people get only one shot. There's no going back, no do-overs, only an inexorable march to the end.

But what if life were different? Catherine Webb, under the pen name Claire North, offers two worlds where this is possible. In The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), she introduces the reader to kalachakra, people who are reborn into the lives they've already lived. The eponymous protagonist, for example, is reborn 15 times at midnight on the cusp between 1918 and 1919.

This is both wonderful and challenging, Webb explains in her New Books interview.

"It's both liberating because he can go through his childhood knowing everything that's going to happen in coming events because he's already lived it, but it's also horrendous because he can be 5 years old on his 11th life being treated like a 5-year-old... and being forced to re-live his ABCs even though he's actually hundreds of years old."

Touch (2015) offers a different way to escape the drudgery of a single, linear life. The main character, Kepler (a moniker assigned by those trying to destroy it), can travel from body to body with a touch. This allows it to live hundreds of years, experiencing the world like a tourist on an endless trip.

Inevitably, the life of a kalachakra or a body-hopping consciousness can become tedious. Harry August struggles with apathy, having seen that whatever he achieves in one life is erased with the reset of his birth. Kepler, too, struggles to find meaning beyond its focus on survival. The ingredients which ordinary people use to measure their lives don't matter to Kepler. For one thing, it no longer has a gender because it can occupy men and women with equal ease. Nor does it have to experience even mild discomfort: whenever it encounters anything not to its liking, it can jump to another body. Even a hangnail can be enough to send it packing.

Webb herself is no stranger to multiple identities. A fan of pen names (she switches among Catherine Webb, Kate Griffin and Claire North depending on the genre and audience), she is as dexterous at changing writing styles as she is at inventing engaging characters and plots, although sometimes she's only aware of the shift in style after the fact, almost as if someone else--her own Kepler perhaps?--had done the work.

"I'm not necessarily aware consciously of a decision to write in a different style. ... The story has its own logic. I let that do the work, and then I'm surprised to turn around and discover that Kate Griffin sounds very different from Claire North."

Podcast No. 15: 'Where Are All the Black People?' A Conversation with Jennifer Marie Brissett

Jennifer Marie Brissett’s first novel, Elysium, or the World After, portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live.

Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, first by her teachers at Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine, where she wrote Elysium as her final thesis, and later by the committee that selected Elysium as one of six nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award.

“I wasn’t sure there was a space for me in this writing world. And to a certain degree I still sort of wonder. But the idea that I could write and that my stories are worthy of being told was something [Stonecoast] really helped to foster in me,” she says in her New Books interview.

In some respects, Elysium is simple: it tells a story of love and loss between two people. But Elysium is also complicated because those two people morph from scene to scene changing from two brothers to father/daughter to husband/wife to boyfriend/boyfriend to girlfriend/girlfriend.

When imagining the future, conventional science fiction often focuses too much on gadgets and not enough on people, Brissett says. “We think [science fiction] is about … the new machines we’ll have, the little gadgets that will make our lives easier … but I think the civil rights movement is one of the most science-fictional things that could have probably happened, because all of a sudden this entire group of people that was totally ignored showed up at the table and said ‘We want in.’”

As a child, Brissett found the Wonder Bread future depicted in The Jetsons frightening. “I remember watching as a kid the Jetsons and thinking ‘That is an absolutely terrifying vision of the future. Where are all the black people?’” she says. “The future belongs to everybody. It doesn’t really belong to any one group. And yet when you see visions of the future, it’s usually mostly white heterosexual people wandering around.”

In the early 2000s, Brissett owned an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she experienced the publishing industry’s struggles firsthand. Rather that discourage her from becoming a writer herself, the experience seems to have solidified her desire to tell stories in the way she wants to tell them. “You have to love this field to be here. If you’re here for money, you are certifiably crazy,” she says.

Spoiler Alert

From 6:45 to 10:24 we talk about a major part of the plot, which is revealed on the book jacket but doesn’t actually emerge towards the end of the book so people might want to skip this part (and not read the jacket copy) if they want to approach the story as a mystery whose answer lies in the book’s structure.

Related Links

• Elysium was inspired, in part, by Roman Emperor Hadrian's love of Antinous.
• Brissett mentions her recently deceased friend, the writer Eugie Foster.
• She also mentions a number of her teachers, including James Patrick Kelly, and writers who have inspired her like Octavia Butler.

Podcast No. 11: Alex London Discusses Pen Names, Gay Characters, and the 'Dystopia' Label

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 dark future. A significant portion of Proxy takes place in a city where the poorest citizens dwell in a violent shantytown known as the Valve while the wealthy thrive in well-guarded neighborhoods of private speedways, luxury homes, and high-tech toys. The sequel, Guardian, is set in a crumbling Detroit exponentially more decrepit than the Motor City of today.

As London explains, the horrors of the Valve are his “futuristic re-imagining” of slums outside of Nairobi, which he witnessed while researching one of his non-fiction books, One Day the Soldiers Came, about children affected by armed conflict. “For a lot of children all over the world caught up in wars and poverty and natural disaster … dystopia is not some kind of fantasy but the day-to-day reality of how they are living,” he tells me.

Although the books portray a grim future, the publisher avoids the word "dystopia" in its marketing of Proxy and Guardian. “They call it a ‘futuristic thriller,’” London says. The marketing department also shies away from the science fiction tag, fearing it's too narrow. But London says he embraces the label. “Science fiction for me implies … an awareness of possibility.”

London himself is brimming with possibility. For one thing, he writes under three names. Proxy and Guardian, which are aimed at young adults, bear the name Alex London. But as Charles London, he’s published adult non-fiction about war and the survival of beleaguered Jewish communities around the world. And as C. Alexander London, he continues to write for middle-grade readers about real-life war experiences and fantastical adventures involving squids and dragons.

Like any good science fiction writer, London seeks to push boundaries. Proxy explores what would happen if wealthy transgressors rigged a system of debt and credit to avoid punishment for their crimes and instead made the poor (known as proxies) receive the punishment instead. London also pushes cultural boundaries: Proxy and Guardian’s main character, Syd, is gay, which makes him unusual as the star of a science fiction series geared for young adults. As a result, London has received an outpouring of fan mail from young people seeking advice. “It’s been very touching to see kids who might not otherwise be drawn to explicitly queer books … find their way to Proxy,” he says. Because the books are primarily thrillers, some kids, especially those living in conservative communities, feel safer reading them than gay-themed books that focus on romance or coming out, he explains.

“I’ve been getting letters from a lot of actually straight boys writing about their friends and wondering how they can be better allies. Those are my favorite,” London says.

Related links:

• Keep track of Alex London on his website and Tumblr.
• Follow the New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy podcast on iTunes, Facebook and Twitter and through host Rob Wolf’s blog and Twitter feed.

Spoiler alerts:

• From 18:45 to 22:16 we discuss some aspects of Syd's love life that those who haven't read Proxy and Guardian may prefer to skip.
• From 33:12 to 34:00 we discuss the science behind a key plot point integral to the resolution of Proxy.

Podcast No. 10: Astronomy & Astrology in "How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky"

My 10th New Books podcast is live. It's with Lydia Netzer, who kept my laughing as we discussed her second novel, How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky. Here's my write-up for the podcast:

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 17^th century, the paths of these two disciplines forked so that today astronomy is a well-established science while astrology is allowed as close to the word “science” as the suffix “pseudo-” allows.

Lydia Netzer, in How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky, tries to turn back the clock, inventing a world where astronomy and astrology harmonize once again. The novel centers on two best friends (both astrologers), who conspire to raise their children (both astronomers) so that when they encounter each other as adults, they fall hopelessly in love.

All this takes place in the shadow of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, a “world renowned Mecca of learning and culture” that’s as fanciful as Netzer's fictional Toledo, a city where “astronomers and mathematicians walk arm in arm down the street and discuss philosophy and cosmology,” she explains in New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

For Netzer, writing is an opportunity to explore every cranny of her imagination. “Every time you write a book, you go into your kitchen and get everything you made, every dish in the oven, everything in the refrigerator, bring it all out, put it on the table because you might not get the chance to write another one, and you just want to say everything you can possibly say,” she says. “Holding back for me is a big mistake.”  

Among the many topics Netzer addresses in the interview are lucid dreaming, which figures prominently in the novel. While her protagonists gain mastery over their dreams, Netzer, in her own life, has met with less success. "One time ... I was able to move a crate of lettuce closer to me in a dream grocery store, which was incredibly disappointing as an outcome. 'Oh, you've managed to control your subconscious, and all you're going to do is make it easier to buy produce.'"

She also discusses the various iterations of How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky, including a first draft without dialogue. "It was terrible, and I don't have that draft anymore. Thankfully a very kind friend helped me to not share it with anyone else."

Other topics she tackles include the mysteries of memory, the differences between first and second novels, homeschooling, and much more.

Related Links

• Follow Lydia Netzer on her website and her Facebook page.
• Follow the New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy podcast on iTunes, Facebook and Twitter and through host Rob Wolf’s blog and Twitter feed.

Podcast No. 9: Fiction that Shapes Science

For my ninth podcast as host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, I chatted with Kathryn Cramer, co-editor of the anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future.

Cramer and collaborators Ed Finn and Neal Stephenson invited writers to contribute science fiction to the collection that "actually addresses problems and tries to solve them," Cramer says.

In other words, the anthology aspires to maximize one of science fiction’s abiding strengths: its ability to test concepts, both technological and social, without spending vast sums on research and development.

In tooling around the internet, I found a bunch of examples of old fiction that appeared to foresee future technology. For instance, Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon appears to foresee Apollo 11 and Mark Twain’s short story From the 'London Times' of 1904 describes something akin to television or maybe even the internet.

The editors and writers behind Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future think many science fiction writers in recent years have lost their way. As evidence, they point to the proliferation of what Cramer calls "tired dystopias." Rather than provide "cautionary tales that show us what to avoid," she explains in the New Books interview, these novels use "dystopias as furniture"—backdrops for a plot centered on a central character’s adventures.

Cramer used the term "neo-Gernsbackian" and thereby introduced me to a historical figure I feel I should have known: Hugo Gernsback, who published the first science fiction magazine.

For more about the ideas behind Hieroglyph, check out the Project Hieroglyph website and listen to Cramer and collaborators in this Google Talk.