Rob Wolf's Blog, page 7
August 22, 2019
Man’s Best Friend Helps Soften the Apocalypse in C.A. Fletcher’s A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1312627557.mp3
I’ve been busy this month, traveling to Minnesota for work to make a video, which explains the extra week between episodes of New Books in Science Fiction (and next month is busy, too, so I’m planning another three week gap).
The episode dropping today features C.A. Fletcher and his new novel, A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, which takes place several generations after a pandemic has turned humans into an endangered species.
For Griz, the adolescent narrator, life is bounded by his family, two dogs, and the Outer Hebrides island where they hunt, fish, and farm.
When Brand, a lone sailor, shows up, Griz is mesmerized by his stories of adventure. But when Brand steals one of the family’s dogs, Griz gives chase.
As Griz and their other dog journey through the ruins of our world, they explore the limits of loyalty while learning a lesson in human cruelty.
“If you’re not true to the things you love, what are you?” Fletcher tells me, quoting Griz. “That’s when you stop being human.”
In our conversation, Fletcher discusses the research that informs the novel’s vision of a “soft apocalypse,” the difference between writing screenplays and novels, his father’s wise words about dogs, and the real-life terrier behind Griz’s canine companion.
Here are some highlights (edited for clarity).
RW: What happened to create this world where Griz and his family are living by themselves on an empty island?
CAF: I don’t go into too much detail about precisely what happened but in general terms something happened to humanity that they called the Gelding. Essentially people stopped being able to have kids and families got smaller and smaller as everybody died off. It was a kind of soft apocalypse. So the world didn’t die in a great zombie holocaust or a nuclear exchange or some terrible bioweapon. People just stopped being able to have kids and humanity in the macro sense did what humans in the micro sense do, which is it just got old and tired and died off and the world ended with a sigh, not a whimper or a bang, and only zero point zero zero one percent of humanity escaped the effects of the Gelding, which means that a world of 7 billion people dwindled to maybe 7,000 people across the whole planet.
RW: I love that term soft apocalypse. It’s very evocative. I read an interview in which you said that creating the setting wasn’t really a matter of world-building but world erosion.
CAF: It wasn’t world-building, it was world subtraction because you look at the world as it is now and then you think, “Well, what happens when the workforce disappears, when electricity goes down, when planes no longer fly, when cars no longer work, when gas and oil are no longer pulled from the ground, when the nuclear power stations have to shut down? What happens when we have no power? What happens when the Internet disappears? What happens when people stop able to travel? when they stop being able to talk to each other across the transatlantic phone lines or satellites?
When all this stops, humanity comes to this very gentle halt and, of course some bad things happened along the way to that moment, but essentially, from a writer’s point of view, the fun thing was looking at everything around us and saying “Okay, what what disappears?” I was very informed in doing that funnily enough by listening on the radio over here on the BBC to a man called Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist who coined the phrase the Anthropocene.
He’d written a book called The Earth After Us that I immediately went and bought it on Amazon and read it except I hadn’t remembered the name of the book correctly, and I hadn’t remembered his name at all. So instead I bought a book called The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which tackles the same problem from a much less geological point of view, but a much more interesting point of view to me as a world-builder. The book is a thought experiment: What happens if all of humanity disappeared today and aliens came down on the planet in 10 years, in 100 years, and 1,000 years, in 10000 years? What would remain of us? how quickly would our infrastructure and our mark on the planet disappear?
RW: What drew you to this story of a kid who runs into the unknown world to track down the thief who stole his dog?
CAF: I was an only child. I remember the morning of my fifth birthday being taken down to the kitchen in the larder to find something and there was a dog. That dog was my dog until I was 22 and was–it sounds hoke– but it was like a family member, like the brother or sister I didn’t have, and if someone kidnaps your family member you go after it. You don’t think about it. And so the connection with dogs has always been there.
My dad, who was not necessarily a very emotional man, wrote a fantastic letter to me when my dog finally died at 22 and he said “If you’re lucky, you get two great dogs in your life: you get the dog that you grew up with as a child and the dog you watch your children grow up with. And he was writing because he was enormously sad have seen the dog I’d grown up with died. And that sort of stuck with me because it was A, an unusual letter, and B because it seemed to be bang on the money and then as we had children they had a dog that grew up with them, I realized the absolute truth about dogs. Dogs have walked the long eons of history beside us in a way no other animal has. And my wife has had exactly the same experience of dogs in her life. So we’ve always had dogs around us and they’ve always been important. If someone stole my dog I would I would definitely take off after them.
August 1, 2019
This is How You Write a Book Together: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone Discuss the Friendship (and Gazebo) Behind This is How You Lose the Time War
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT9241538806.mp3
I was excited but nervous to talk to not just one but two great writers in a single go on the current episode of New Books in Science Fiction. There were technical challenges, especially since we were in three locations; I was particularly worried that we’d talk over each other. And then there’s the fact that Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone are super smart. It’s hard enough to ask one smart person engaging questions to elicit answers that listeners will find engaging, but when you got two brilliant guests? Yikes.
Fortunately, Amal and Max made it easy for me. They have a great rapport, one forged in the triple fires of friendship, co-authorship, and now co-book marketing. I was worried that they’d already done enough joint appearances and interviews that the wouldn’t say anything fresh, but there were definitely a few moments where they surprised even each other with things they hadn’t said before.
Here’s my brief write-up about the episode as it appears on the New Books Network.
For Blue and Red—arch enemies at the center of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s epistolary novella, This is How You Lose the Time War—the only thing that endures after millennia of espionage and intrigue is love.
El-Mohtar and Gladstone are themselves avid letter writers who favor fountain pens and G. Lalo stationery over pixels and Gmail. So it was only natural that when they decided to collaborate on a novella about enemies-turned-inamoratas, they structured the tale as a correspondence.
Since Blue and Red can travel across timelines and live for eons, they compose their letters from materials that take a long time to manipulate, such as the rings of a tree, an owl pellet, lava flows, and sumac seeds.
El-Mohtar and Gladstone, on the other hand, were constrained by ordinary time and space. “He writes about four times as fast as I do. So it was it was tricky at first,” El-Mohtar says. “But then as we rounded off the first act, we started changing the pace of our respective writing. Max slowed down and I sped up. And then we were finishing at exactly the same time.”
Like the co-authors, the book’s characters also found a rhythm. Blue and Red start our as sworn enemies sent across timelines to fight on behalf of very different futures. But they find that they have more in common with each other than they do with the universes that they’ve promised to defend.
Red is “hungry for something more than what’s known,” Gladstone says. “In Blue, she finds not just someone who takes the world as seriously as she does, but someone who has the same depth of desire and focus and devotion to her chosen art, which is time war … who throws her beyond her own limits.”
“From both of their perspectives, there is a sense of alienation and insufficiency in the worlds that they come from,” El-Mohtar says. “Blue is someone who feels this constant gnawing, insatiable hunger that nothing in her world seems able to sate… until she starts being surprised by Red, this agent on the other side, who makes things hard for her.”
July 18, 2019
Ready or Not, NASA Confronts the Threat of an Alien Invasion in David Wellington’s The Last Astronaut
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT6904544093.mp3
In The Last Astronaut, David Wellington turns his prolific imagination—which is more often associated with earthbound monsters like zombies, vampires, and werewolves—to the threat of an alien invasion.
Set in 2055, the novel introduces a NASA ill equipped to respond to the arrival of a massive object from another star system. The agency no longer has an astronaut corps, so it turns to the last astronaut it trained, 56-year-old Sally Jansen, who retired in disgrace years earlier after the death of an astronaut under her command.
Jansen and a crew of three, who are trained for space flight in just a few months, race to greet the massive 80-kilometer-long visitor, but the goal of each member of her team is as varied as their personalities. One wants to fulfill a life-long dream of being an astronaut; one wants to communicate with aliens; one wants to study them; and one wants to destroy them.
Wellington says his interest in science fiction goes back to when he was six and he himself aspired to be an astronaut. “I wrote a letter to NASA saying, ‘Can you tell me what I should do to become an astronaut?’ And they sent me back a very nice form letter telling me I should enlist in the military and learn how to fly a plane,” he tells me on New Books in Science Fiction. “They also sent me a manila envelope full of glossy 8-by-10 photographs of rocks on the moon and the Saturn 5 rocket and the Apollo lander and the Space Shuttle. Those photographs became some of my most prized possessions.”
The alien object in The Last Astronaut was inspired by ‘Oumuamua, which astronomers first observed in 2017 and had trouble classifying, first calling it an asteroid and now a comet. Because of its unusual trajectory and apparent interstellar origin, some even thought it could be an alien spaceship.
“This is definitely a horror story,” Wellington says. “There’s violence, there’s death … This is not The Martian. In the Martian, Andy Weir creates a situation of peril, but it’s all about solving that problem. My book is much more about surviving, if you can.”
As for the all-important question of whether he’d rather dine with a monster or a space alien, Wellington is quick to answer. “I’d much rather have dinner with an alien,” he says. “I would love to try to communicate with a creature from another planet.”
The Last Astronaut (Orbit) will be available July 23.
July 4, 2019
Worse than the French Revolution? Eliot Peper Tackles Income Inequality in his Latest Techno-Thriller Breach
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1661916753.mp3
I was delighted to have Eliot Peper back on the pod this week to talk about Breach, the final book in his Analog trilogy.
At the heart of his series is a massive corporation, one radically different from most science fictional companies. What makes it so different? It aspires to do good.
The growth of Commonwealth into a benevolent behemoth is chronicled in the series’ first two novels, Bandwidth and Borderless (which Peper discussed on the New Books Network last fall.) By the end of Borderless, Commonwealth, which controls the near-future version of the internet, has become its own sovereign entity, one whose control of the “feed” has given it enough soft power to force nations—through a clause in its terms of service—to implement an international carbon tax.
Breach opens 10 years later. By this point, Commonwealth has instituted open borders and replaced national currencies with “feed credits” (if that sounds crazy, see Facebook’s recently unveiled plans to create its own digital currency, Libra). Commonwealth is now considering implementing something that one of the company’s loudest critics, billionaire Lowell Harding, is willing to kill to prevent: progressive membership fees—essentially a wealth tax—which will charge users to access the feed in proportion to their net worth, with profits invested in infrastructure for the poor.
Harding calls the plan “worse than the French Revolution” and “f**king Piketty on algorithmic steroids!”
Peper brings back the characters from the first two books, giving a star turn to Emily Kim, a hacker turned MMA fighter who has gone into hiding after earlier misdeeds. Between suspenseful fight scenes, characters grapple with heady topics like economic inequality, corporate responsibility and national governance.
There’s a message in Peper’s books for today’s internet giants. The companies “that have gained a lot of power in society,” Peper says, “need to look in the mirror and think about how they should actually be making decisions … that will actually result in a future that people want to live in for the long term not just for the next quarterly report.”
June 21, 2019
Vandana Singh Breaks the Laws of Physics Very Carefully in Ambiguity Machines
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT2088351347.mp3
Vandana Singh has made a career of studying both hard science and the far corners of creativity. It’s no surprise then that Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2018), which was nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, reflects a fluency in multiple cultures—not just western and eastern, but the idioms of both particle physics and fantastical narratives that reach far beyond what science can (as of yet, at least) describe.
“One of the things that really bothers me about how we think about the world is that we split it up into all these different disciplines and fields that have impenetrable walls between them, and one of the reasons I love … writing science fiction is that it allows us to make those walls porous,” Singh tells me in the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction.
Read excerpts from my conversation with Vandana Singh on Literary Hub. Read excerpts from other interviews here.
A reader might think that an expert in both particle physics and climate science would hesitate to write stories that explore impossibilities like time travel or machines “that cannot exist because they violate the known laws of reality” (the subject of the collection’s eponymous tale). But Singh embraces paradox and the simple truth that there’s still much about the universe that we don’t understand.
Scientists are supposed to be objective and “check their emotions at the door,” she says. But it “isn’t that simple because, after all, the paradox is that we are a part of the universe, studying the universe. And so how can we claim full objectivity?” Singh feels the only way to be authentic is “to acknowledge who I am as a human, as this little splinter of the universe conversing with another little splinter of the universe.”
Themes that recur in her include nostalgia for childhood, mothers yearning for children (and children yearning for mothers), loneliness, and a sense that reality is slippery—that people and inanimate objects aren’t always what they seem.
Born and raised in New Delhi, Singh’s Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics. She now lives near Boston, and is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Earth Science at Framingham State University. Ambiguity Machines is her second short story collection.
Several of the stories’ characters are, like Singh, female scientists, and their struggles to be taken seriously reflect real-world conditions.
“In the physical sciences, it’s still pretty tough for women,” says Singh, an assistant professor of physics at Framingham State University. “We have plenty of gender issues in India but the assumption that women can’t do as well or don’t have the ability … is not that strong or strident in India.” In the U.S., however, “the negative micro-messaging and sometimes macro-messaging I’ve come across has been ‘Well a woman, so what do you know?’ You’re automatically assumed to be more touchy-feely and … you must not be as good at science, which is utterly absurd.”
For Singh, physics and storytelling are intrinsically linked. “The way that I think about physics is really influenced by the way I think about story, and they’re different but they talk to each other,” she says. For instance, she’s used fiction “to explore concepts that help me also conceptualize climate science for the classroom and beyond, and think of or reframe different ways of thinking about climate change and what’s happening to our world. … I guess one analogy I could make is binocular vision. I have two ways of seeing the world, and they talk to each other so you get more depth.”
June 5, 2019
In Theory of Bastards, a Misanthropic Scientist Sees Humanity in Bonobos’ Sexual Exploits
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT7369645427.mp3
Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards (Europa Editions, 2018) uses a scientist’s relationship with bonobos—and her struggle to keep them alive following a civilization-shattering dust storm—to explore climate change, overdependence on technology, and the challenge of a body that produces more pain than pleasure.
The novel–which won this year’s Philip K. Dick Award and Dartmouth’s –was almost never written. Despite the fact that her four previous books had been well received, Schulman found it a continual challenge to get published and was on the brink of abandoning writing altogether. But Kent Carroll, the editor at Europa Editions who oversaw the publication of her novel Three Weeks in December, reached out, saying he wanted to publish a new book by her.
“I’ve always wanted to write—there’s nothing more I’ve wanted—and so given the opportunity, I couldn’t say no.”
Schulman’s work returns again and again to a few themes. “I feel like every writer—if they’re very lucky—figures out the themes that allow them to do their best writing. And I seem to have very, very narrow themes: some large, charismatic mega-fauna, a hint of possible violence, a different climate, some possible scientific research, and the main character has to be in a body that’s somehow physically different from most other people.”
The main character in Theory of Bastards, Frankie Burk, an evolutionary psychologist and recipient of a MacArthur genius award, has endometriosis, a painful condition that limits her activity and fuels her misanthropy. As the book opens, the 33-year-old Frankie is arriving at the Foundation, a zoo for primates where she can observe bonobos to research her hypothesis about infidelity—the eponymous “theory of bastards”—which postulates that the reason 10 percent of human children are produced through affairs (a number Schulman encountered while researching the book) is because the mothers have an impulse—regardless of the strictures against infidelity—to have sex with men whose genes will improve the child’s immune function.
“You have to wonder why there is such a huge percentage of children who are not related to their fathers,” says Schulman, who was raised by her father after her own mother had had an affair. “There has to be a big benefit because the dangers are so big for getting pregnant illegitimately, for having a bastard. And so the theory that my character comes up with is that that it offers genetic benefits.”
The plot takes a sharp turn when a dust storm knocks out the power and information grid. To keep both themselves and the bonobos alive, Frankie and her colleague David Stotts, free the animals and lead them on an expedition across rural America, where the primates show that they might be better suited than humans to survive in what appears to be a post-technology world, and Frankie starts to shed her misanthropy, even as society is on the brink of collapse.
“I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic novels, but it’s almost always only able-bodied humans that survive. Nobody ever pulls their pet corgi out of the rubble and marches on. And I just thought it would be really interesting to play out what would happen if a relatively capable, somewhat-similar-to-human species survived with humans, post-apocalypse.”
Schulman is working on a new novel featuring dolphins.
May 16, 2019
Caitlin Starling Goes Deep into a Dangerous Cave–and the Minds of Her Characters–in The Luminous Dead
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT9455769004.mp3
Caves have always given me the creeps, but thanks to Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead (Harper Voyager, 2019), they now terrify me.
Starling’s debut novel takes readers along with her young protagonist, Gyre Price, to a place that I think few would voluntarily go—into a deep, pitch-dark cave inhabited by avalanche-inducing, rock-eating worms from which only one human being (among many explorers) has emerged alive.
Gyre thinks the risk of scouting for minerals is worth it because the job pays so well that it will allow her to escape her home planet (a godforsaken mining world) and search for her missing mother. In addition, she’s wearing a state-of-the-art suit, which protects her from the cave’s potentially lethal environment.
What she doesn’t count on is Em.
Normally, there’s a whole team of experts guiding cavers like Gyre, but when she’s deep underground Gyre learns her team consists of only one person, a woman named Em, who owns the mine but whose motives and reliability become increasingly murky as the days pass.
“The more that it is only Em there with her, the worse things get because Em isn’t sleeping, Gyre isn’t getting to talk to anybody else …, and they’re getting more and more drawn into each other’s problems as opposed to it being a professional sort of interaction,” Starling says.
Gyre knows Em only by voice and an occasional video transmission, and yet they form a profoundly intimate—and arguably twisted—bond. It perhaps comes as no surprise that Starling was a teen in the 1990s, forming intense online relationships with people she never met in person. “It’s very easy to construct ideas around who that person is and what your relationship is like that can become very tumultuous or intense,” she says.
With a single setting and only two main characters, one of her biggest challenges was keeping the plot propulsive. Fortunately, with corpses of dead cavers appearing in unexpected places, massive worms threatening to bury her, and the ever-present possibility that rather than help Gyre, Em wants to kill her, Starling meets that challenge with page-turning ferocity.
May 3, 2019
The Upside of Dystopia: Meg Elison’s Characters are Free to be Themselves in The Book of Flora
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT4188207188.mp3
Meg Elison set a record (and she didn’t even know she was competing) for being the most interviewed guest on New Books in Science Fiction. I had her back on the show for the current episode to discuss the final book in The Road to Nowhere trilogy, and, just as in our conversations about the first two books, we had plenty to talk about.
Read excerpts from my recent interviews (including this episode with Meg Elison) on Literary Hub.
The Road to Nowhere is as much about gender as it is about surviving the apocalypse. The first installment, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning , set the tone with a pandemic that destroyed civilization, leaving behind 10 men for every woman. To avoid rape and enslavement in this male-dominated landscape, the eponymous midwife must present herself as a man to survive.
In the next volume, The Books of Etta, which takes place a century later, gender remains fraught but the rules have changed. The midwife’s legacy lives on in the town of Nowhere, where women are decision-makers and leaders. In this evolved world, Etta is allowed to choose the traditionally male job of raider, although she must still pretend to be a man to travel across a sparsely populated Midwest. Fortunately, this isn’t as heavy a lift for Etta as it had been for the midwife since Etta prefers to be called Eddie and identifies as male.
The notion of choice is one that Elison takes a step further in the trilogy’s latest and final installment, The Book of Flora. Assigned male gender at birth, Flora was castrated as a youth by a slaver, and, as an adult, identifies as female. Although she doesn’t always find acceptance among the communities she encounters, she refuses to hide her gender identity even when traveling alone, preferring the risk of being female to hiding who she is.
“As the world goes from absolute chaos to small pockets of … a more peaceful existence for women, I thought the most gendered person in the series, Flora, was the right person to come to something like peace,” Elison says.
Set in a still dangerous world, The Book of Flora is nonetheless a riot of humanity, full of characters representing marginalized voices and communities incubating new cultures and norms. There’s even a hint of an evolutionary leap that may one day make gender obsolete.
“I was really interested in books like Gulliver’s Travels, but also in the idea of, after the loss of national media and immediate communications, how different our societies would immediately become: we’d have these little pockets of culture where every town would have its own urban legends and every town might have its own religion and every town might have its own courtship rituals. So that that gave me a real opportunity to get weird and I got really weird with it, and it was extremely fun.”
April 11, 2019
Don’t Judge an Alien by its Tentacles in Charlie Jane Anders’ The City in the Middle of the Night
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1550036559.mp3
This week on New Books in Science Fiction, I speak with Charlie Jane Anders, the award-winning author, who is also a publisher, performance artist, podcast host and, as organizer of the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco, a patron of the arts.
Her new book, The City in the Middle of the Night (Tor Books, 2019), is set on a planet of rigid social classes, harsh climate and frightening aliens. It is a story that tackles heavy themes: revolution, genocide, colonization, and the decline of human civilization.
It is also a coming-of-age tale about Sophie, a young woman who ventures where no human has gone before: into the planet’s permanent dark side. There she befriends the Gelet, the tentacled native inhabitants whom humans fear and hunt but who turn out to be sensitive, sentient, and able to communicate with Sophie through touch.
Eventually, Sophie submits to transformative surgery that makes her neither fully human nor fully Gelet, and yet places her squarely between the two species, the perfect spot (one hopes) to serve as an ambassador and halt (with the Gelet’s help) humanity’s decline.
Humans are never going to be able to adapt to life on this planet because it’s so different from Earth. We’re an invasive species, and the most we can do is come up with systems that enable us to approximate something that makes sense to us. But it’s not going to work forever.
–Charlie Jane Anders
Anders, whose previous work has earned Hugo, Nebula, William H. Crawford, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus and Lambda Literary awards, is an advocate for the power of science fiction to help humans prepare for the future. “I think that thinking about the future is a muscle. And the more you think about the future and the more you try to imagine different possible futures, the stronger that muscle gets and the more prepared you are for whatever is coming,” Anders says.
March 20, 2019
Alien Invaders Shine a Light on Human Nature in Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Insurrection
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https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT4218574838.mp3
Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Insurrection takes us deep into the heart of an alien invasion that divides humans among those who welcome the extra-terrestrials and those who want to stop them.
The book is the second in Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy. The first, Rosewater, earned the inaugural Nommo Award for Best Novel, Africa’s first-ever prize for speculative fiction.
In most tales of alien invasion, mankind and the invaders battle to the death. In Thompson’s tale, however, there is more inter– than intra-planetary conflict, with the insurrection in the title referring to the city of Rosewater’s rebellion against greater Nigeria. Meanwhile, the alien invaders have their own conflicts, with Wormwood—a powerful consciousness that reads minds and invades human bodies—battling for its survival against a fast-growing plant from its home planet.
The book reflects a subtle grasp of war and politics with characters capable of eliciting a reader’s empathy even as they sometimes behave in less than admirable ways.
“What someone told me this week about The Rosewater Insurrection was that they don’t know who to root for. To me that just means that I’ve been successful in showing the different points of view and the reasons for them doing what they’re doing without bias,” Thompson says.
There are hints of Thompson’s own life in the storytelling—as a working psychiatrist, as a Londoner of African heritage, as a student of history. The most powerful characters in The Rosewater Insurrection are women, reflecting his upbringing. “I had really strong sisters,” he says. “If you think about your average sub-Saharan African country now, there is lots of misogyny… However, the women actually hold the society up.”
For Thompson, human nature is largely to blame for the civil war at the heart of his story.
“They were dealing with something they don’t understand, and the human tendency when they don’t understand something is to lash out one way or the other. … Any time when you get prolonged uncertainty with human beings, conflict is usually the outcome.”
