Rob Wolf's Blog, page 6
January 29, 2020
War Twists Time and Truth in Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade
Some war stories emphasize heroism and a higher purpose; others emphasize brutality and disillusionment.
The first kind of story got Dietz, the narrator of Kameron Hurley’s military science fiction novel The Light Brigade (Saga Press, 2019), to enlist in a war against aliens from Mars. The second is the story that emerges from their experience as they learn that truth—and reality itself—are two of the war’s biggest casualties.
Read excerpts from this episode and other New Books in Science Fiction episodes on Literary Hub.
On this episode of New Books in Science Fiction, we discuss using a mathematician’s help to map her time-jumping plot, working with a hands-on literary agent, and making ends meet as a writer, among other things. Hurley wrote candidly in a recent blog post about the fact that paying the bills—even for a successful, regularly published, award-winning author like herself—isn’t always easy.
As she explained: “When I was laid off from my last job, we were able to scrape by for about 10 months and then we started having to dig into the credit cards, mainly because health insurance costs more than my mortgage…. I wouldn’t have made it without Patreon. I write a short story month [for subscribers who pay $1 or more a month]. … I felt like a pulp writer. I was like “This is what it must have been like in the day when Robert Howard was like ‘oh crap’ or Ray Bradbury was like, ‘I need to pay the rent, and so I’m going to write a short story.’” … We’re looking at ways we can adapt and create new forms and streams of income because most of us are not going to make it on just the books. You have to find other ways and different ways because the world has changed, the entire market has changed.”
Hurley is the author of 11 books. She has received numerous awards, including two Hugo Awards, a British Science Fiction Award, and a Locus Award.
January 15, 2020
In Mike Chen’s A Beginning at the End, the Challenges of Parenthood Grow Exponentially after the Apocalypse
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT3152128278.mp3
The end of the world is no excuse for eating French fries.
That’s a lesson 7-year-old Sunny Donelly learns from her father, Rob, who tries to give her as normal a childhood as possible in the post-pandemic landscape of Mike Chen’s A Beginning at the End (MIRA, 2020).
Trying to be a good dad, Rob showers Sunny with attention and gives her fatherly advice, telling her, for instance, that lying is bad and that French fries aren’t healthy. But there’s an all-important thing he hasn’t told her: that her mom is dead, the victim of an accident during the outbreak that killed billions.
Rob isn’t the only one trying to outrun his past with a lie. The other main characters—Moira Gorman, a former pop star, and Krista Deal, an event planner—are also hiding secrets.
Set six years after the pandemic, Chen’s second novel imbues a San Francisco that feels almost like our own with a haunting sense of loss. But while trauma hovers over his characters’ lives, resiliency, loyalty and love ultimately prevail.
What if “something absolutely catastrophic happened and you try to pick up after that?” Chen tells in his appearance on New Books in Science Fiction, explaining the question that inspired the book. “The story I wanted to tell was… what if infrastructure and all the things that we’ve come to rely on are still existent in some form, but 70 percent of the people in the world are just gone? What you’re left with is not a survival tale but a trauma tale.”
Chen appeared on New Books in Science Fiction last year to discuss his first book, Here and Now and Then.
January 2, 2020
In Seanan McGuire’s Middlegame, Siblings Conquer the Universe with Language and Math
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT2674798412.mp3
Science fiction and fantasy often features antagonists who seek absolute control (over their kingdom, country, world, galaxy or universe). But few break down the secret to power as elegantly as Seanan McGuire in Middlegame, where the forces of nature are subdued by the union of language and mathematics.
McGuire sees elements of a “modern Frankenstein” in her novel about a brother and sister created by a ruthless alchemist in a laboratory under an Ohio cornfield. But instead of a hideous monster, her alchemist produces two brilliant siblings, whose comically rhyming names (Roger, a language genius, and Dodger, a math prodigy) bely their potential to control time and space.
The siblings are a study in contrasts. Life is easier for Roger, whose facility with language opens doors. Dodger is suspicious of people and keeps to herself. “Dodger is a math prodigy and a smart girl. And those are two things that tend to get you kicked in the teeth by the world over and over again,” McGuire told me in her New Books interview.
Raised in separate homes and at first unaware of each other’s existence, Middlegame’s complicated plot is as much a story about the sibling’s on-again off-again relationship as it is about the discovery of their powers and their own alchemical origins.
“It took me 10 years to write because I had to get good enough to write it first. The flow charts for Middlegame were kind of a nightmare in and of themselves,” McGuire says.
Like Roger, McGuire was an English prodigy. She is also a science fiction all star. The author of 36 books, she’s received numerous awards, including the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2010 and Nebula and Hugo awards in 2016 for best novella. She’s twice won Hugo’s for best fancast and in 2013 received a record five Hugo nominations.
She attributes her prolific output to a conscious choice. “If you’re somebody that wants to have more of a social life than I do or wants to have more of a family life than I do, you need to make different choices,” she says. “At this point I am functionally … an Olympic athlete. It’s just that my sport is novel writing, so I’m in training every single day to be able to start and finish the next book in a timely fashion.”
December 19, 2019
In Famous Men Who Never Lived, K Chess Imagines a Universe with 2 Brooklyns
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT5537889508.mp3
First off, I want to thank an unofficial Hugo book club for DM’ing me on Twitter and suggesting I interview K Chess about her debut novel Famous Men Who Never Lived (Tin House, 2019). AUHBC loved the book, and I did too.
The novel (which has made several Best-of-2019 lists) is set in two Brooklyns. In one, people ride in trams; in the other, they take subways. In one, the swastika is a symbol of luck; in the other, it signifies hate. In one, science fiction is literature; in the other, it’s considered mere genre.
Helen (Hel) Nash, the main character in K Chess’s debut novel, comes from the other Brooklyn—the one with trams and innocuous swastikas. She is a refugee from a nuclear war, one of 156,000 Universally Displaced Persons who escape through an experimental gate from her timeline to ours.
Like many refugees, she’s having a hard time adjusting. Not only has she lost friends and family—including her son, who she can never see again—but she faces a new world of unfamiliar laws, customs, and culture. It doesn’t help that most people in our timeline eye UDPs with mistrust.
Hel’s and our world diverged around 1910. “It was fun to think about all the things that happened since nineteen hundred,” Chess says in her New Books interview. “For instance, light beer wasn’t invented until the 70s, so that might not exist in the other world. There are many things that could have gone very differently, both in large-scale world history and in small-scale inventions.”
Instead of trying to assimilate, Hel becomes obsessed with establishing a museum to preserve her vanished timeline’s art and culture. She is fascinated—and frustrated—by the loss of the thinkers, artists and inventors who accomplished great things in her world but died prematurely in ours. “There was something especially poignant,” Hel thinks, “about knowing exactly what these men and women might have accomplished if only history had proceeded the way it ought to have.”
In this episode, Chess discusses, among other things, why she doesn’t like her book’s title, New York’s resonance as a city of immigrants, human beings’ attachment to the past, and how she built an alternate world through small but important details.
November 22, 2019
A Song for a New Day: Sarah Pinsker Connects with Her Audience on Stage and Page
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT2189420364.mp3
Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day explores how society changes following two plausible disasters: a surge in terrorism and a deadly epidemic.
In the Before, people brush against each other in crowded cities, gather in stadiums to watch baseball games, and hang out in clubs to watch live music.
Read excerpts from this episode and others on Literary Hub.
In the After, curfews and bans on public gatherings give rise to mega-corporations that allow people to work, study, shop, and socialize in virtual reality.
The two eras come to life through the stories of Pinsker’s main characters: singer-songwriter Luce Cannon, who misses the Before, and Rosemary Laws, who comes of age in the After.
The two collide when Rosemary starts recruiting musicians for StageHoloLive, a virtual reality entertainment company. In the After, most musicians would be thrilled to have Rosemary offer them an exclusive contract. But Luce is different. She would rather perform before a small flesh-and-blood audience (even if it’s illegal) than be turned into a holograph projected into millions of headsets.
“Having two characters with vastly different worldviews is a great way to get some interesting conflict,” Pinsker tells me on the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction.
A prolific short story writer, Pinsker has won Nebula and Sturgeon awards for novelettes. She is also a singer-songwriter, which helps explain the vividness of her portrayal of dedicated musicians like Luce. A Song for a New Day is her first novel.
“I’ve said a couple times that I don’t think I’m as good as Luce is, which is part of the joy of writing fiction. She’s not me and I’m not her, but I got to put the best of my favorite performers into her. I love live performance. I think the parts of me that are in Luce are the making-a-connection-with-an-audience parts; we’re trying to win people over.”
(A special thank you to Sarah Pinsker for allowing us to close the episode with an excerpt from her song Waterwings.)
November 7, 2019
A Civil War Could Be Just Around the Corner: An Interview with Craig DiLouie about Our War
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT9145026606.mp3
In science fiction, “near future” usually refers to settings that are a few years to a few decades off. But Craig DiLouie’s Our War—about a second U.S. civil war that starts after the president is impeached and convicted but refuses to step down—feels as if it might be only weeks away.
Born in the U.S., DiLouie now lives in Calgary, Alberta. He is the author 18 books of science fiction, fantasy, horror and thrillers.
Our War came out in August, a month before the U.S. House of Representatives launched its impeachment inquiry. When he started writing in 2017, “I was looking at the growing polarization in America and political tribalization, which is considered one of the five precursors to civil war,” DiLouie tells me on the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction. “I hope it stays in fiction.”
The story is told through the eyes of a young brother and sister who are used as soldiers by opposite sides. He set the book in Indianapolis because “it’s a quintessential American city… a very blue city in a sea of red, rural areas.”
He said he was inspired to write the book in part by a Save the Children video that depicted a civil war in the United Kingdom through the eyes of a young girl, with each second representing a day. “She starts out with a birthday party and she’s happy and then there’s a you see her swinging on a swing set then… her dad’s reading a newspaper and the headline is saying ‘martial law is declared.’ You see the the war encroach more and more until they had to flee their home. They end up in a refugee camp … and you’re like ‘Oh my God. That’s horrible because it’s someone we know. It’s someone from our culture, not some far off country.”
He says he strove to be even-handed, focusing less on politics and more on the human impact of civil war. “At any given time, there’s hundreds of thousands of [children] fighting around the world,” says DiLouie, who read reports from the U.N. as part of his research into the psychology of child solders. A child soldier’s “loyalty is not based on an ideology… They end up staying and fighting because the militia becomes their family.”
While the conflict in the book eventually ends, DiLouie makes clear that the children’s scars—physical and psychic—will last a lifetime.
October 24, 2019
H.G. Parry’s The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep Celebrates Literary Analysis with a Bit of Magic
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT5255265654.mp3
While all fiction writers can pull characters from their imaginations and commit them to the page, most readers can’t do what Charley Sutherland can: pull characters from the page and commit them to the real world.
Sutherland’s fantastical ability is at the center of H.G. Parry’s debut novel The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep. It is both a mystery (Sutherland and his brother must find and stop a stranger who shares Sutherland’s ability but is using it for nefarious ends) as well as a celebration of literary criticism.
While the ability to bring characters to literal life might seem like a wonderful talent, it’s been a problem for Sutherland. Ever since he was little, he has tried—with the encouragement of his family—to suppress the urge.
“There’s a long tradition of characters with magical abilities who are being told to keep it hidden and to stay normal, and it comes from the fact that a lot of people grow up feeling like what makes them special is something that’s weird or strange, and they try and keep it in,” Parry says. “The other side of it, though, is that books are incredibly powerful and there’s a real danger to stories and storytelling. When you bring something into the world, it’s got the power to do extraordinary things, the power to save the world or to harm it. And there’s a real responsibility that comes with reading, interpreting and storytelling.”
Like Sutherland, Parry has a Ph.D. in English literature (her research focused on children’s fantasy, his on Charles Dickens). She lives in Wellington, New Zealand (where the The Unlikely Escape is set) and teaches English literature, film, and media studies.
There is something that’s very intellectually exciting, very thrilling about the act of literary analysis and the act of reading a book–seeing clues, building your interpretation, building a particular version of the story for yourself–that I wanted to celebrate.
—H.G. Parry
October 10, 2019
Opponents Battle Over What it Means to be Human in John Birmingham’s First Space Opera The Cruel Stars
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT9950938588.mp3
After authoring more than 30 books, including memoirs, military science fiction, alternate histories, and a book of writing advice, John Birmingham was ready to try his hand at the sweeping and dramatic science fiction sub-genre known as space opera.
But you’d never know The Cruel Stars (Del Rey, 2019) is his first attempt at epic, interstellar, battle-of-the-ages storytelling. His deft hand has produced a tightly paced, suspenseful, and bitingly funny adventure full of wild military tech, high-stakes conflict, and five eloquent characters.
“I’m a huge fan of the [space opera] genre, but it took me a while to get the confidence to write my own,” Birmingham told me in our conversation on New Books in Science Fiction.
The conflict at the core of The Cruel Stars pits the Sturm—who believe with Nazi-like conviction in keeping humans “pure,” i.e. free of genetic or technological enhancements—against the rest of humanity.
“I very much based [the Sturm] on the ultra-right, which was coming to scary prominence as I was first putting this book together. But in a way, the system against which they set themselves isn’t particularly pretty either.”
Set in the far future, the story follows multiple protagonists: a scrappy lieutenant who suddenly finds herself commanding a powerful warship, a pre-pubescent princess on the run from the Sturm, a sharp-shooting pirate, a centuries-old, reclusive and foul-mouthed war hero, and a prisoner convicted of treason whose computer-generated soul is facing permanent “deletion.”
Each character has a distinct voice and unique challenges. Princess Alessia, for example, transforms overnight from a coddled heir to an embattled leader while war hero Admiral Frazer McLennan must finally confront the guilt he feels for decisions he made hundreds of years ago when he last battled the Sturm.
But the story’s center of gravity is Lucinda Hardy, the lieutenant-turned-commander. “Hers is the story I want to investigate most of all,” Birmingham says. “She grew up poor, and she finds herself moving through rarefied and powerful centers of society. Early on, one of the other characters tells her ‘You don’t belong here.’ And the thing that she has to come to terms with over the course of her story is whether or not she does.”
The Cruel Stars, which came out in August, is the first installment of a planned trilogy.
September 26, 2019
Reproductive Rights Take Center Stage in Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT7648931720.mp3
Amid a wave of time travel books published this year, Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline stands out for its focus on a woman’s right to obtain a safe abortion.
The book, which comes out this week from Tor, opens in an alternate America in which women gained the right to vote in the 1870s (rather than 1920), but abortion never became legal.
“I was imagining that if women had gotten the vote earlier, there might have been a backlash, which would have prevented a reproductive rights movement from really taking hold,” Newitz tells me on the current episode of New Books in Science Fiction.
In the novel, time travel has gone mainstream. Anyone with the proper training can do it, although technically it’s only supposed to be used for research. That doesn’t stop Tess, under the guise of studying cultural history, from trying to “edit” the timeline to thwart men’s rights activists from trying to subjugate women through their own illicit edits.
And hidden within Tess’s agenda is another secret, which she hides even from her trusted friends. That secret is revealed slowly to the reader, through alternating chapters set in the 1990s in Irvine, California. For those chapters, Newitz draws on their own experiences, including being raised by an abusive father.
While the father in the story is different from their own, “what’s true to my own experience is the emotional part of it,” Newitz says, adding that one of the ways “that fiction allows us to get distance on things that have happened to us is that we get to make shit up, and somehow, in the act of doing that, it’s healing.”
The Future of Another Timeline is Newitz’s second novel. Their debut novel, Autonomous, which they discussed on the show last year, was nominated for Nebula and Locus awards, and won a Lambda Literary Award. They also co-host, with Charlie Jane Anders, the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, which won this year’s Hugo for best fancast.
September 12, 2019
Quick to Anger, Interplanetary Travelers Leave the U.S. Virgin Islands Forever Changed in Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT9721105911.mp3
Science fiction can do a lot of different things. It can entertain, of course, and speculate about possible futures or stretch the bounds of science with a dose of imagination. It can also get readers thinking about the way we live, right now, today.
Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson did all those things for me. It entertained even as it got me to think about important and topical things like immigration, colonization, and even anger management. And it introduced me to a place that no other science fiction novel has taken me to before: the U.S. Virgin Islands.
I guess it’s inevitable that once I started writing about home, something clicked for me.
—Cadwell Turnbull
The islands (which are a United States territory) serve as Earth’s entry point for the Ynaa, beings from a far corner of the universe whose intentions and desires are as complex as the humans who come to loathe them.
The Ynaa (pronounced EE-nah) claim to come in peace, but there are echoes of colonization in the way they manipulate humans with fear and violence. And just as attitudes toward European colonization are reflected in the use of words like “discover” versus “invade,” so too do Virgin Islanders debate whether the Ynaa violently “invaded” or more neutrally “arrived.”
Humans are no match—either physically or technologically—for the Ynaa, yet that doesn’t stop some angry (and one might argue foolish) homo sapiens from trying to thwart them. Turnbull treats humans and Ynaa with an even hand, offering cultural and psychological insights into the nature of toxic masculinity and the Ynaa’s bursts of extreme violence.
Even though Turnbull is from the U.S. Virgin Islands, he initially avoided it as a setting for his fiction. But when a teacher in his MFA program “recommended to me quite nicely that I should write about my own experience,” he found himself crafting stories that eventually turned into The Lesson.
“I guess it’s inevitable that once I started writing about home, something clicked for me. I think that my giving myself the opportunity to have that conversation with the place where I was from allowed me to find my way into storytelling in a way that I feel is more meaningful. I think a lot of the things that I was trying to explore in the novel—faith and sexuality and relationships and violence and toxic masculinity—all these things are things that I have had to explore within myself.”
Note: In the interview, we talk about Hurricane Dorian as if it were a relatively minor storm. The interview was conducted on August 28, the day Tropical Storm Dorian moved through the U.S. Virgin Islands and turned into a hurricane. The U.S. Virgin Islands were not substantially affected, but four days later, Hurricane Dorian turned into a devastating Category 5 storm that inflicted catastrophic damage on the Bahamas.
