Rob Wolf's Blog, page 4
January 14, 2021
In Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun, Myth and Megafauna Come to Life in a Fictional Mesoamerica
The first chapter of Rebecca Roanhorse’s new novel, Black Sun, features a mother and child sharing a tender moment that takes an unexpected turn, ending in violence.
It’s a powerful beginning to a story whose characters struggle with the legacies of family expectations, historical trauma, and myth.
These three strands are most powerfully manifest in Serapio, the child in the opening scene, who is raised to fulfill a legacy on the day of the convergence, a solar eclipse on the winter solstice. His sole purpose is to avenge a massacre of his mother’s clan, drawing upon magic to carry out the mission. And yet he has never lived among his mother’s clan, nor was he alive when the massacre occurred, raising complex questions about duty, history, and how individuals find meaning in their lives.
“Serapio has always been on the outside,” Roanhorse tells me on today’s episode of New Books in Science Fiction. “He feels like he has a purpose, a destiny tied up with something pretty dark, that he’s doing on behalf of people that don’t even know he exists.” Roanhorse explores “what that feels like and what your obligations are even to the point of putting aside your own needs to try to fulfill something that in the long run may not be the best thing for you, but you’ve been set on that path by others. How do you break free of that, if you can, and if you should? I think those are the sort of questions I’m trying to raise that I hope readers struggle with and think about.”
Set in a fictional Mesoamerica and inspired by American indigenous and Polynesian cultures, Black Sun is the first book in a planned trilogy. Roanhorse appeared on New Books in Science Fiction in 2018 to talk about Trail of Lightning.
Leadership transitions are anything but smooth (sound familiar?) in @RoanhorseBex’s Black Sun. I was thrilled to have Rebecca Roanhorse join me (again!) on @newbooksscifi to discuss writing and challenges her characters face in a fictional Mesoamerica: https://t.co/j0CDnBLTVv pic.twitter.com/B9AS7GiINc
— Rob Wolf (@RobWolfBooks) January 14, 2021
December 24, 2020
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, Disaster Inspires a Meaningful Response to Climate Change
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN9661510511.mp3
I was excited to have the thoughtful, talented and prolific Kim Stanley Robinson on the latest episode of New Books in Science Fiction to talk about The Ministry for the Future, his sweeping novel about climate change and how people in the near future start to slow, stop and reverse it.
The story opens with a devastating heat wave that kills thousands in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. From there, Kim Stanley Robinson pulls back to show us the world’s reaction, taking readers from the eponymous Ministry for the Future (which advocates for new laws and policies, like carbon quantitative easing) to scientists in Antarctica, where glaciologists pump out water from under glaciers to slow their slide into the ocean.
The book’s kaleidoscope of viewpoints goes beyond humans to include animals, inanimate objects and abstract concepts, like caribou, a carbon atom and history. Robinson also uses multiple forms, from traditional first- and third-person narratives and eyewitness accounts, to meeting notes and history lessons, to riddles and dialogues. The effect is epic, conveying both the complexity of the problem and a wake-up call.
“I want to make the very strong point that it’s never game over,” Robinson tells me. “It’s never too late to start doing the right things.”
And the right things add up. The novel spans 30 year, and over that time, the cumulative efforts of individuals, governments, scientists and even terrorists start to reverse the damage.
“Especially for young people, I’m always trying to emphasize that it’s not like we were having fun … in the carbon-burn years and now you’ve got to suffer and live like saints forever. It’s actually that we were obese and hurting and stupid. And now you could be smart and stylish and clever and have more fun.”
November 25, 2020
In Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, Voting is Harder than Magic
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT9290805890.mp3
Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches begins with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time” but the novel is anything but a traditional fairy tale. Yes, there are witches. But there are also suffragists. Yes, there are spells. But there are also women who fall in love with each other.
While Harrow loves fairy tales “because they give us this shared language,” she hates them for the limits they impose. Through her main characters, the Eastwood sisters, she turns the familiar archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone on their heads. “The Maiden-Mother-Crone triptych is something that I have always hated. It’s pretty gross to define a woman’s existence by her reproductive state at that moment,” Harrow tells me on the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction. “I wanted to be embodying and subverting it at the same time.”
As the story unfolds, women’s demands to rediscover and use magic parallel their demands for political power and social freedom. In the guise of a fairytale, The Once and Future Witches explores the long afterlife of family trauma, the evils of demagoguery, and the blind spots of the American suffragists when it came to overcoming divisions of race and class.
Harrow’s debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, was a finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. The Once and Future Witches is her second novel.
October 29, 2020
P. Djèlí Clark Brings to Life the Monster that is White Supremacy in his New Fantasy Ring Shout
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1635639828.mp3
P. Djèlí Clark’s new novella, Ring Shout, is a fantasy built around an ugly moment in American history—the emergence of the second Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century.
The story follows three monster hunters: Maryse Boudreaux, who wields a magic sword; Chef, who had previously disguised herself as a man to serve with the Harlem Hellfighters during World War I; and Sadie, a sharpshooter who calls her Winchester rifle Winnie.
The monsters are Ku Kluxes—member of the KKK who have transformed into huge, six-eyed, pointy-toothed, flesh-eating demons.
The idea to turn hate-filled racists into larger-than-life demons came from Clark’s work as a historian. (In addition to an award-winning writer of speculative fiction, Clark is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.)
When reading narratives of formerly enslaved individuals collected by the Federal Writers’ Project, he’d been struck by the way they described the KKK. “They often talk about them … wearing simply a pillowcase, sometimes having bells on them, sometimes having horns or tails. And they speak of them as haints, that is as ghosts and spirits,” Clark tells me.
Clark’s two careers—historian and fiction writer—have grown side by side (his first major publication, A Dead Djinn in Cairo, was published the day he defended his PhD.) While he has tried to keep the careers separate (by writing under a pen name), Clark believes they complement each other.
Fiction can animate information lost to history, he says.
“Finding the voices of enslaved people, finding out what they thought is very difficult. There weren’t a lot of people going around asking them what they thought during that time. And so what you have to do, for instance, if you’re trying to understand an enslaved person, you might read a lot of court records or you might try to read what their owners thought and then you have to speculate and piece together that enslaved person’s life.”
October 8, 2020
Animals Evolve but Humans (Unfortunately) Remain the Same in Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT7711383982.mp3
In Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (Viking, 2020), residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits.
The rabbits make fine citizens—more than fine, in fact. They in live harmony with the environment (embracing sustainable practices like veganism, for instance). They have a strong sense of social responsibility. They’re also smart: The average rabbit IQ is about 20 percent higher than the average human IQ.
Yet despite their upstanding qualities, the haters keep hating.
Fforde is an accomplished satirist and uses humor to spotlight some of our ugliest impulses, including racism and xenophobia. In The Constant Rabbit, a populist party known as TwoLegsGood has parlayed leporiphobia (fear of rabbits) into a successful political movement. In control of the government, TwoLegsGood is planning to segregate the nation’s more than 1 million rabbits in a “MegaWarren” where they will be under round-the-clock surveillance and their freedoms curtailed.
TwoLegsGood’s treatment of rabbit has echoes of all caste-based and hate-filled societies, from Jim Crow to apartheid to the Nazis. “When it comes to the sort of demonizing of the minority other, there’s just so much to draw on. You don’t need to go to any specific place in the world or a specific time. You can just pick and choose from here, there and everywhere,” Fforde tells me on the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction.
“The rabbits are being got rid of because they’re not human. But, of course, one of the first things that any discriminatory group will do against another group of humans will be to dehumanize them, to make them non-human. And this is often done through language. We had a politician recently in the in the U.K. who started referring to immigrants a plague.”
The novel’s first-person human protagonist, Peter Knox, denies having animus toward rabbits—in fact, he finds himself falling in love with one—and yet he’s forced to come to terms with the fact that he, too, has played a significant role in their oppression.
“I think the book is hoping to say to people, ‘Look, you cannot look at the hate groups and say “These people are the hate groups. I’m nothing like them.” In fact, perhaps what you should be thinking is “Maybe I am complicit, and in what ways could I possibly be so?” ’
September 17, 2020
I Thought We Were Glamping: Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness Stretches a Mother-Daughter Relationship to its Limit
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT7813919141.mp3
Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness is a poignant portrait of a mother and daughter fleeing the polluted cities of a near-future dystopia for a hand-to-mouth existence in the country’s last undeveloped tract. It’s also one of the unusual works of speculative fiction that’s been embraced by the world of high literature by (just this week) reaching the final round of the prestigious Booker Prize.
Although Cook has lived mostly in cities, she loves spending time in nature and wrote some of The New Wilderness while trekking across the high desert of Oregon.
“There is something about the expansiveness of lands that are empty that make my imagination feel a lot freer than it usually does in a city,” she says.
For Cook’s protagonist Bea, the Wilderness State offers the only hope for saving the life of her 5-year-old daughter, Agnes. But as Agnes’ lungs heal from the city’s smog, her relationship with her mother grows strained, suffering rifts that might be typical for a mother and daughter but are magnified by the strain of having to invent a nomadic way of life in a remorseless expanse.
“The Wilderness State is this very extreme place and this very extreme situation so it pushes everyone to a very extreme version of how they would normally be,” Cook says.
August 27, 2020
It Looks Like a Human and Talks Like a Human? Madeline Ashby’s The Machine Dynasty Trilogy Explores Self-Realization Through Robot Eyes
Writers and readers of science fiction love stories about artificial intelligence, robots, and mechanical beings whose sentience mirrors, matches or exceeds that of humans.
The stories stay fresh for the reasons stories about humans do—sentience confers individuality, which provides endless permutations for character and plot.
Madeline Ashby’s trilogy, The Machine Dynasty, explores the limits of sentience, the meaning of free will, and what it means to look, act, and feel like a human but be denied basic human rights.
Published in July, the third book, ReV (Angry Robot, 2020), shows readers the results of a final face-off between self-replicating humanoid robots and humans. That the robots, known as vN, want their freedom, is natural. What isn’t natural is the failsafe programmed into their consciousnesses that requires them to aid humans in distress or danger—or self-destruct.
With the failsafe in place, humans use and abuse the vN as they please—as mates, sex objects, laborers. “The failsafe became a way to talk about free will and consent,” Ashby tells me on New Books in Science Fiction.
Robot stories are usually written from a human perspective, but Ashby tells the story from the perspectives of the vN. “There’s a ton of science fiction stories about humans who can’t tell robots apart from other humans. But there are very few stories about robots who can’t tell humans apart from each other, or robots who are the ones judging what a human being actually is.”
July 30, 2020
Science Meets Lovecraftian Horror in Premee Mohamed’s Beneath the Rising
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT2328824031.mp3
Premee Mohamed’s debut novel, Beneath the Rising, came out in March, but don’t call her a new writer.
“I find it funny that people refer to people who have just started to get published as new writers. I finished my first novel when I was 12. I’m not a new writer. What I am is new to publishing, and it’s so weird to me that people conflate the two, as if you just started writing at the moment you started getting published,” Mohamed says in the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction.
She’d completed the first draft of Beneath the Rising in 2002, around the time she’d received her undergraduate degree in molecular genetics, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she decided to try and publish it. Until then, writing was “very much my private little hobby.”
Beneath the Rising combines horror, science fiction and fantasy in its portrayal of the complicated friendship of Nick and Joanna (Johnny). They’d been close since they were young children despite many differences (she’s a rich, white, world-famous scientist; he’s a poor, brown, ordinary guy). But their relationship gets tested when Johnny’s latest invention—a clean reactor the size of a shoebox—unleashes Lovecraftian monsters, and, in the process of helping Johnny battle this cosmic evil, Nick uncovers secrets that change his view of Johnny.
The monsters pose the ultimate foil for Johnny, who, like many scientists, wants to both understand the world and control it.
“As a scientist,” Mohamed explains, “she wants [the monsters] to be understandable, to be comprehensible. And, of course, they can’t be reduced down to something you can study in the lab and that just drives her berserk.”
July 9, 2020
In Ilze Hugo’s Vision of a Post-Apartheid City, Laughter Kills
Few science fiction writers have their vision of the future tested upon publication. But that’s what happened to Ilze Hugo, whose novel about a mysterious epidemic, The Down Days (Skybound Books, 2020), debuted in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“For it to be published right in the middle of all this is the most surreal experience,” Hugo told me when I spoke with her in June for New Books in Science Fiction.
Many of the book’s details are spot on: masks, online funerals, elbow bumps in lieu of handshakes. But the South African writer is frustrated that she missed a few nuances like “the way that your glasses fog up when you’re wearing a mask … or the fact that you get acne.”
“Something that you can’t really understand until you’ve experienced it is how at the beginning of [the Covid-19 pandemic], everyone was taking it fairly seriously, and they were quarantining and self-isolating. Now if you go to the shop, you have people acting as if we’re not in a pandemic at all. It’s as if people can only emotionally stress about it or think about it for a certain period of time and then they go back to their lives.”
While contagious, the illness in The Down Days is unusual: people laugh themselves to death. As surreal as this sounds, Hugo was inspired by a real event—the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, which in 1962 reportedly affected nearly 1,000 individuals.
While the real-life laughing epidemic was considered a mass psychogenic illness, the disease in Hugo’s book is real–and deadly.
“It’s a real illness but no one really understands where it came from and what it’s all about… I did that quite deliberately because while I was writing it, our country was in a kind of unstable place politically … We had a president who believed that you could prevent HIV/AIDS just by showering, and I suppose life felt very absurd to me and I felt, to a certain extent, that South Africa hadn’t healed from the wounds of apartheid and everyone–at least on the more privileged side of the scale–was trying to say, ‘You know, it’s happened it’s over let’s move on.
“But it’s very difficult to move on when a lot of a large part of the population are still dealing with the physical implications of apartheid and the psychological implications. So I was reading up about mass hysteria and they were saying that some scientists believe that it’s a physical manifestation of a society under chronic stress.”
Although the story doesn’t explicitly mention the devastating—and ongoing—impact of apartheid, Hugo says it’s woven into the fabric of the story. “I think every single South African novel ever written is about apartheid in some way even though it doesn’t necessarily mention it because it’s such a fresh issue for us that we are all constantly aware of it. Just the way that the characters interact with each other and through small comments, it’s always on the surface.”
June 18, 2020
A Siblings’ Bond Endures in Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi’s Searing Near-Future Novel about Racism and Survival
Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby (Tor.com, 2020) tells the story of two siblings—Ella, who is gifted with powers of precognition and telekinesis, and her younger brother Kevin, whose exuberant resistance to systemic racism earns him a one-way ticket to jail.
Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults is as much a tale of the siblings’ bond as it is a portrait of white supremacy, police brutality, and the anger of Black Americans at centuries of injustice.
The book’s publication just months before the murder of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic might seem prescient, yet the novel could have been written at any point in the last several decades (or centuries) and still felt timely.
Kev is born during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. A few years later, the police killing of Sean Bell leads Ella to run away from home, afraid that her anger, harnessed to the supernatural powers she can’t yet control, might cause her to hurt those she loves.
“She’s changed as a result of having seen [Sean Bell’s murder] in a way that I think a lot of people were changed when they saw footage of Laquan McDonald’s death or Philando Castile’s, these immensely traumatic visual experiences,” Onyebuchi tells me on the latest episode of New Books in Science Fiction.
Onyebuchi rejects the notion that anger must be productive. “When I started writing Riot Baby, I was very angry, and I feel like one of the things that happens during these periods of American unrest, particularly along a racialized vector, is this idea of productivity, that the anger has to be productive,” he says.
“And there was a part of me, a very large part of me, that was essentially ‘Screw that. I’m not here for respectability politics.’ Black people have been playing the respectability politics game since time immemorial. And in the history of modern America, what has it gotten us? And that was a lot of what powered the omnipresence of anger in the book, this idea that it doesn’t have to be productive.”
