Rob Wolf's Blog, page 5
May 27, 2020
In Megan O’Keefe’s Velocity Weapon characters search for truth in a universe full of secrets
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT2736416276.mp3
Velocity Weapon (Orbit, 2019) by Megan E. O’Keefe centers on siblings: Biran, a member of an elite cadre that controls the interstellar gates by which humans travel among star systems, and his sister, Sanda, a gunner who finds herself waking 230 years after her last battle on an empty, enemy spaceship, believing she’s the last human alive.
O’Keefe’s characters search for truth in a universe where the secrets are centuries old and where A.I.s depend on humans as much as humans depend on A.I.s.
Among the many themes O’Keefe’s space opera explores are the limits of human perception. In Sanda’s case, her reality is controlled by a spaceship. “They are elements of horror when you can’t trust the environment you live in, when the only thing keeping you alive might be dishonest,” O’Keefe says.
O’Keefe challenges Tolstoy’s claim that “all happy families are alike” by giving Biran and Sanda an upbringing in their two-dad home that is as happy as it is unique.
“I enjoy taking the opportunity to explore a family that is actually united—they have their squabbles, of course—but they love each other and are trying to do the right thing in an impossible situation,” O’Keefe tells me on New Books in Science Fiction.
Velocity Weapon, which was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award, is the first book in O’Keefe’s Protectorate trilogy. The second book, Chaos Vector, is scheduled for publication in July.
May 22, 2020
K. M. Szpara on Sex, Exploitation, and Rebellion: Highlights from our Conversation
Check out my convo about DOCILE w/ @KMSzpara via @NewBooksSciFi & @lithub “I gave myself permission to write something that was unabashedly queer and had a lot of sex and kinks in it but also dealt with serious issues that have afflicted our generation” https://t.co/Zs5Al3MB4h
— Rob Wolf (@RobWolfBooks) May 22, 2020
May 6, 2020
Elon Musk Meets Sigourney Weaver in Laura Lam’s Space Adventure Goldilocks
Laura Lam’s new book Goldilocks takes readers into space with an all-female crew bound for a distant Earth-like planet.
The all-female crew isn’t the only twist; there’s also the fact that the five astronauts steal their spaceship.
The crew aren’t mere bandits, but the spacecraft’s original crew, who’d been shoved aside by a reactionary patriarchy intent on confining women to home and family.
“As a little girl, I thought sexism was on the way out. And in the last few years, I’ve realized, ‘Oh no, it’s definitely not,’” Lam tells in our conversation on New Books in Science Fiction, discussing her motivations to write the book.
When NASA confiscates the spacecraft of Valerie Black, a billionaire entrepreneur who Lam describes as a “cross between Elon Musk and Sigourney Weaver,” Black steals it back. She and her crew “know they’re the best people with the skills and training to find this new planet, which is humanity’s last hope because Earth has only 30 years left of habitability due to climate change,” Lam says.
Lam found inspiration in the unsung women who’ve played a role in the history of spaceflight, including the Mercury 13, a group of women who’d passed the same physiological tests as the seven men of the Mercury project in the late 1950s. “The Mercury 13 really helped me focus the book. … There are all these women who have been influential in space flight, but we still haven’t had a woman on the Moon,” Lam says.
April 16, 2020
The Trauma is Real Even When the Crimes Aren’t in Tyler Hayes’ The Imaginary Corpse
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT8618633962.mp3
My guest Tyler Hayes’ The Imaginary Corpse offers an escape from the unending stress of the Covid-19 pandemic with three simple words: plush yellow triceratops.
Nothing could be farther from our collective coronavirus nightmare than the Stillreal, where Hayes’ protagonist, Tippy (the aforementioned triceratops), runs the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency. Which is not to say that the book doesn’t have its own nightmares or traumas; they’re just softened by the fact that all the characters are imaginary friends created by people (“actual people, out there in the real world,” as Tippy explains) who are forced to abandon them after suffering a horrible trauma (domestic violence, child molestation, and fatal car accidents, to name a few).
So even though Tippy is a cheery sunflower yellow, his nature is informed by a violent incident that led his creator, eight-year-old Sandra, to surrender him to the liminal world of the Stillreal. There, he solves crimes that happen to other imaginary friends, like his roommate (a disembodied hand), or the hotelier (a towering eagle in a stars-and-stripes apron) whose inn serves as a rest stop for new arrivals.
The Imaginary Corpse is a mashup of fairytale, comic book, noir and science fiction, making it thoroughly unclassifiable.
“I set out from the beginning knowing this was a book for adults,” Hayes tells me. And yet it’s a noir with soft edges. “The choice to make the book kind was one of my biggest driving goals… This is a kinder world than a lot of fictional worlds, than often our world is. I stuck hard on that, on the idea of community, the idea of compassion, the idea of empathizing and accepting people where they are.”
The Trauma is Real, Even When the Crimes Aren’t, in Tyler Hayes’ The Imaginary Corpse
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT8618633962.mp3
My guest Tyler Hayes’ The Imaginary Corpse offers an escape from the unending stress of the Covid-19 pandemic with three simple words: plush yellow triceratops.
Nothing could be farther from our collective coronavirus nightmare than the Stillreal, where Hayes’ protagonist, Tippy (the aforementioned triceratops), runs the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency. Which is not to say that the book doesn’t have its own nightmares or traumas; they’re just softened by the fact that all the characters are imaginary friends created by people (“actual people, out there in the real world,” as Tippy explains) who are forced to abandon them after suffering a horrible trauma (domestic violence, child molestation, and fatal car accidents, to name a few).
So even though Tippy is a cheery sunflower yellow, his nature is informed by a violent incident that led his creator, eight-year-old Sandra, to surrender him to the liminal world of the Stillreal. There, he solves crimes that happen to other imaginary friends, like his roommate (a disembodied hand), or the hotelier (a towering eagle in a stars-and-stripes apron) whose inn serves as a rest stop for new arrivals.
The Imaginary Corpse is a mashup of fairytale, comic book, noir and science fiction, making it thoroughly unclassifiable.
“I set out from the beginning knowing this was a book for adults,” Hayes tells me. And yet it’s a noir with soft edges. “The choice to make the book kind was one of my biggest driving goals… This is a kinder world than a lot of fictional worlds, than often our world is. I stuck hard on that, on the idea of community, the idea of compassion, the idea of empathizing and accepting people where they are.”
March 28, 2020
#clapbecausewecare
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#clapbecausewecare #nyc Thank you everyone delivering, cooking, stocking, treating, saving lives!! pic.twitter.com/K1QdstLQaJ
— Rob Wolf (@RobWolfBooks) March 27, 2020
March 26, 2020
In Ken Liu’s New Collection, Characters Grapple with Family and History in a Post-Human World
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT5917092854.mp3
’s second collection of speculative stories explores migration, memory, and a post-human future through the eyes of parents and their children.
Whether his characters are adjusting to life on a new planet or grappling with moral quandaries—like whether a consciousness uploaded to a server is still human—his characters struggle with the age-old task of forging their own identities apart from the definitions and limits imposed by society, biology—or their parents.
“We all have the experience of not wanting to be labeled, of being put into categories that we naturally feel a sense of resistance to,” Liu tells me in our conversation on New Books in Science Fiction.
I recorded our conversation on March 11, just as the pandemic in the US was beginning to change things. In my office, we were just starting to encourage people to work from home (but in a sign of how rapidly things have been changing, it was only a few days later that we shut down our offices and essentially ordered people to work at home). Now it seems, the virus is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, but when Ken and I spoke, it was hovering in the middle distance. Still, it now seems strange that we hardly mentioned it, except when the interview was officially over. But because that part of the conversation now seems essential, I left a bit of our post-interview banter in.
Here’s a bit more from our conversation:
Rob: A lot of the stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories grapple with history, what it means to remember history, what memories and stories get passed down. How do those themes play out in the first story, “Ghost Days,” which unfolds in three places and times—Hong Kong in 1905, Connecticut in 1989, and a planet called Nova Pacifica in 2313?
Ken: It’s three stories, one nestled within the other in a recursive way. So you start the first story and you go back in time to start the second story and then go back in time some more to start the third story and then you go back up the stack to unwind the story all the way out to the outermost layer. Through it all, the one constant is this little artifact from Earth’s past that links the three stories together as a kind of family tradition, the family memory. The story overall is a meditation really on what it means to be connected to our past and how do you make that history new and rejuvenated every time. …
Take the Nova Pacifica story. The protagonist, a little girl, is post-human. She is the child of human colonists, but she has been genetically engineered to live on this new planet, to be adapted to its chemistry and its physiology. She’s in school, and the teachers, who are humans, try to teach her about the history of humanity, and humanity’s past heroes. And she’s very resistant to it because, in her view, these are not her heroes, and she doesn’t have a connection to them. But by the end of the story, she willingly tries to participate in the ritual and to reenact the stories of these heroes, but with her own interpretation of what she’s doing, with a new meaning on it.
Rob: In the story “Thoughts and Prayers” you deal with three of the most horrific phenomena of our time: mass shootings, trolls, and social media. A mother keeps the memory of her murdered daughter alive by uploading her images and videos to the internet and turning her into an advocate for gun control, but her image and memory get hijacked by trolls. No one wins.
Ken: I think what I wanted to do with this story is to explore our obsession with narratives, with stories that somehow allow us to perform our empathy. This is something that I have become more and more skeptical of. Oftentimes the way we praise a piece of art or a creator or somebody who has become a cultural icon is to say that they’ve humanized some condition, that they’ve humanized some suffering. So if a book is about the experience of prisoners, it has to “humanize” the prisoners and to make their suffering relatable to us in some way, or if it’s a refugee narrative, it has to be a story that somehow “humanizes” the experience of being a refugee.
Why do we demand that victims perform to arouse our sympathy? Why do we demand that human suffering must be told in some consumable story before we recognize that they’re human?
We ought to accept as a given that the victims who die in a shooting are in fact human beings who have been horribly killed. We don’t need to have their stories told in a humanizing way to arouse our sympathies. We shouldn’t at least. But it seems like in our community, in our society today, where attention is such a scarce resource, we have to constantly tell these stories to demand that we pay attention to them, to put a face and a name to some abstract vision of suffering. And I really am very concerned about our demand for victims to perform for our benefit. … We seem to be OK with demanding folks who are suffering to perform their pain. And I’m not OK with that.
March 12, 2020
Is Love Possible When One Side Has All the Power? K.M. Szpara’s Docile mixes sex, power, and inequality in his debut anti-capitalist takedown
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT6776135300.mp3
In Docile, the debut novel by K.M. Szpara, people pay off family debts by working as indentured personal assistants to the ultra-wealthy.
Tor describes the book as a “science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power.” Szpara describes the book as “really gay.” As it turns out, both descriptions are true.
Szpara could have kept the story relatively simply by making Docile a tale of exploitation and rebellion, but he isn’t content to portray the wealthy Alex simply as an abusive patron who brainwashes his compliant docile, Elisha. Instead, their relationship is complicated by society’s efforts to make servitude more palatable by providing dociles with rights (like the right to adequate food and medical care, the right to vote, etc.) and a drug (which Elisha scandalously refuses) that helps dociles forget their suffering.
Szpara also dares to have Alex and Elisha fall—or at least think they are falling—in love. This raises a host of questions. Who is Alex falling in love with—the real Elisha or the man he’s created through his harsh “training”? Does Elisha have the agency to love after being dominated and manipulated into becoming Alex’s perfect companion?
As Szpara tells me in his interview on New Books in Science Fiction: “People say to Elisha ‘maybe you just like this kind of sex because it’s the kind of sex you were taught to have. Maybe you just like Alex because he taught you to like him. Maybe you only like playing the piano, or these clothes because Alex gave them to you.’ And then he has to ask himself: ‘But they’re the things that I like. Do I have to not like the things that I like because they were thrust upon me?’”
Szpara continues: “So many things are thrust upon us by people, by capitalism, by people who are making decisions above us and handing them to us and telling us to like them. At a certain point you just say, ‘Oh hey, I like this, and I accept it. You know, I like this new song by Lady Gaga even though I hear it a thousand times a day, and that’s probably why I like it, but I just do. I enjoy listening to it.’ …We don’t exist in worlds where we can always make pure and good decisions all the time.”
February 27, 2020
Trees Advocate for Themselves in Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT7131220638.mp3
To catch the people who killed her environmentalist father, the main character of Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds disappears into a virtual world of overlapping LARPs—live action role-playing games. But Sura Neelin soon discovers that the LARPs are more than games. They’re also an underground economy that meets players’ needs for food, shelter, services and everything else the non-virtual world also provides.
Among the concepts she encounters is the idea that software can provide inanimate objects with self-sovereignty, allowing them to take charge of their own destinies. Sura discovers that self-sovereignty can apply to things like a river or a forest, giving them the ability to advocate for their own health and well-being—essentially putting them on an equal footing with humans who might try to exploit them.
For Schroeder, who is both a writer and professional futurist, science fiction can be both entertainment and a laboratory to explore ideas like self-sovereignty. He’s been hired by governments and companies to write fictional scenarios to test the implications of new concepts and technologies. “What stories allow you to do is bring together immense numbers of different ideas and get them all spinning and interacting at the same time without people losing track of what’s going on,” he tells me on latest episode of New Books in Science Fiction. “You can pile immense amounts of complexity into a narrative and people will understand it intuitively and seamlessly in a way that they will not understand a 400-page report.”
February 13, 2020
Love Blooms Amid Poltergeists and Missing Moms in Nino Cipri’s Homesick
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT2012657796.mp3
When Nino Cipri entered the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, they had no expectation of winning, so when they won, they were shocked. The prize came with a publishing contract, and suddenly Cipri was scrambling for a literary agent, negotiating a contract, and reaching a wider audience.
“I wasn’t really planning on writing a short story collection for probably another decade,” Cipri told me when we talked on New Books in Science Fiction. “I don’t have the kind of output that a lot of other short story writers do. I was publishing maybe one or two stories a year.”
Cipri’s modestly belies the maturity of their writing. The stories in Homesick combines science fiction and horror to create complex tales about everything from ghosts and alien seedpods to difficult mothers and falling in love. Structurally, the stories vary. In addition to using third-person narration, there’s a story built on letters, a multiple-choice quiz, and a transcript of a series of recordings. What all the stories have in common is an interest in the meaning of home, and the presence of queer and trans characters.
[image error]Post-interview selfie: Wolf and Cipri after their convo.
“For me personally, as a trans person, I’m always thinking about what does home mean when I literally don’t feel at home in my body, or didn’t for a long time. I do now. And what does home mean for a lot of trans and queer people when home is not a safe place for us,” Cipri says.
Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. They are a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop and earned their MFA in fiction from the University of Kansas in 2019. Homesick is their first book.
