Rob Wolf's Blog, page 8
March 6, 2019
120 Years is No Obstacle for A Father Trying to Save His Child in Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1654439306.mp3
Mike Chen’s debut novel Here and Now and Then (MIRA, 2019) is a portrait of patience. The main character, Kin Stewart, waits 18 years for his employer to retrieve him from an assignment. Then, after being rescued, he needs many months to re-acclimate to his old life.
Those waits, however, are nothing compared to how long it takes him to re-connect with the daughter he is forced to abandon: more than 120 years.
Stewart, of course, has no ordinary job. He’s an agent from the year 2142, employed by the Temporal Corruption Bureau to fix anomalies in the timeline. When his retrieval beacon breaks on assignment in the 1990s, he’s convinced he’ll be stranded forever. To make the best of a dire situation, he ignores his employer’s prohibition on having relationships in the past: he falls in love, gets married, has a daughter, and settles into a quiet life in the suburbs.
In a way this book is like a giant advocate for everyone to go get therapy and resolve yourself of guilt because otherwise you’re going to carry it forever.
—Mike Chen
Needless to say, it throws a monkey wrench in his plans when the Temporal Corruption Bureau arrives in 2014 and compels him to return to 2142, where an entirely different life—including a fiancé who thinks he’s been gone only a few weeks—awaits.
For Chen, time travel is a vehicle to explore topographies of loss and healing. Being ripped from first one time and then another, leaves both Kin and those around him despairing—until he discovers that 120 years is no obstacle to the love of a father trying to do anything to save his child.
February 18, 2019
It’s A.I. vs. A.I. in Crucible, James Rollins’ Latest Sigma Force Installment
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT3349014713.mp3
James Rollins’ books are usually categorized as thrillers, but most of them could easily be labeled science fiction. An instant bestseller, his latest novel, Crucible, is no exception, revolving around the effort to control Eve, an artificial super-intelligence invented by a Portuguese graduate student, Mara Silviera.
On one side of the conflict is a secret sect, the Crucibulum. The spiritual descendents of the Spanish Inquisition, the members of the Crucibulum consider female scientists like Mara to be heretics and witches. On the other side is Sigma Force, a group of former soldiers working for the Defense Department’s research and development arm. This is Collins’ 14th novel featuring Sigma Force.
Yes, I do think I’m writing science fiction, to be honest with you.
—James Rollins
When the Crucibulum steal Eve and order her to destroy Paris, the only way Sigma Force can hope to prevent disaster is by unleashing Eve’s equal: a second Eve.
The two Eves represent the risks and rewards of the singularity, Rollins tells me on the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction. The bad Eve is a super-intelligence run amok, one who will do anything—including destroying its human inventors—in a fight to survive. The good Eve, who sides with Sigma Force, represents the hope that “the singularity will be a boon to mankind,” Rollins says.
Collins concedes that genre categories are sometimes arbitrary. “When I wrote my first novel, Subterranean, I thought I was writing a science fiction novel,” he says. “My editor … said, ‘Hey, we’re going sell this as a modern-day thriller,’ and I said, ‘What about those telepathic marsupial creatures that live under Antarctica?’ and she said, ‘You set your story in modern times, and you have enough scientific basis for those telepathic marsupial creatures, so therefore we’re just going to pitch you as a thriller writer.’”
February 2, 2019
Read Excerpts from the Tom Sweterlitsch Interview on LitHub
If you don’t have time to listen to my New Books in Science Fiction podcast with Tom Sweterlitsch (although it’s well worth your time, in my highly unbiased view), Literary Hub has published excerpts from the conversation, as part of its ongoing collaboration with the New Books Network.
“I’m a huge fan of @NeillBlomkamp. I’m dying to know what he’d do with this book.” Tom Sweterlitsch on his science fiction thriller THE GONE WORLD (@PutnamBooks) and watching the District 9 director turn it into a screenplay https://t.co/S0oI0I1efd via @lithub @NewBooksSciFi
— Rob Wolf (@RobWolfBooks) February 2, 2019
January 29, 2019
Reality Proves Slippery in Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1079080082.mp3
In the new episode of New Books in Science Fiction, I interview Tom Sweterlitsch about The Gone World (G.P. Putnam Son’s, 2018), which tells the story of a Navy investigator who travels to the future to solve present-day crimes.
The book opens with a brutal murder and a search for a missing girl, and maintains the pace of a chilling page-turner. But Sweterlitsch’s second novel is also an exploration of consciousness, identity, and reality.
The idea of using time travel to solve crimes emerged from a conversation the author had with his brother-in-law, a real-life special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
“A lot of his investigations are essentially solved when a victim or someone who knows a criminal tells the investigators what happened and why, but if people don’t talk, the investigation becomes very difficult and sometimes impossible to solve,” Sweterlitsch says. “And so [my brother-in-law] was musing that if he could go forward in time, he could talk to a lot of the witnesses after the emotions had cooled, and they might be more willing to talk.”
A lot of characters express beliefs about the nature of the universe, but in almost all cases, those beliefs are proved incorrect.
—Tom Sweterlitsch
Sweterlitsch gives his protagonist, Shannon Moss, the ability to jump forward in time, but any future she visits is only a possibility, one of an infinite number of options. That means the clues she collects aren’t hard-and-fast truths; at best, they are hints that may (or may not) allow her to solve a crime. Such futures are referred to as “Inadmissible Future Trajectories,” since the evidence they generate can’t be used to prosecute a case. The only certainty, as far as Moss and her fellow time-traveling agents are concerned, is the present—or “terra firma,” as they call it.
The notion that the present is a fixed reality remains a cornerstone of Moss’s beliefs even as the case of the missing girl grows more complex and Moss’s trips to the future start offering more questions than answers. Sweterlitsch introduces a host of fascinating concepts, such as “echoes”—duplicates brought from Inadmissible Future Trajectories who already exist in terra firma. “Thin spaces” are dangerous places where slivers of different times and places intersect, and “lensing” is the idea that a future trajectory is always warped by a time traveler’s psyche, much as dreams are shaped by the unconscious.
Sweterlitsch has found inspiration in everything from Dante’s Inferno to J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition to Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men.
In the Inferno, “the punishment for the heretics is that they can see far off into the future but can’t see the present … And that was the perfect literary precedent for what I was hoping to write about in this novel in terms of the mechanism of time travel, but it also put the idea of heresy and belief into the book,” Sweterlitsch says. “A lot of characters express beliefs about the nature of the universe, but in almost all cases, those beliefs are proved incorrect by the novel itself… Reality around them is very slippery.”
January 17, 2019
Sing Out Loud (the Fate of Our Species May Depend on it): Catherynne M. Valente On Space Opera‘s Humor and Humanity
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http://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT8699992418.mp3
The Eurovision Song Contest has launched careers (think ABBA and Celine Dion), inspired outrageous costumes, and generated spinoffs. The campy competition also led a fan to dare author Catherynne M. Valente on Twitter to create a science fictional Eurovision, resulting in the publication of Space Opera (Saga Press, 2018) two years later.
Shunning science fiction’s typical seriousness, Space Opera strives to be as ridiculous—and funny—as possible. “You can’t play ‘Eurovision in space’ straight,” Valente told me during our conversation on New Books in Science Fiction, and proves her point by turning Eurovision’s 50 nations and 100 million viewers into a competition that extends across the universe, attracting billions of viewers and outrageous alien performers—everything from sentient viruses and talented wormholes, to creatures that look like red pandas—but can travel through time—or like Microsoft’s much-maligned animated office assistant Clippy.
Space Opera’s intergalactic song contest was founded following the devastating Sentient Wars to promote amity among species (much as Eurovision was designed to promote understanding among nations—as well as promote the newfangled technology of TV—after two world wars).
Speaking of Eurovision, Valente says: “I think it’s one of the more extraordinary things that humanity has ever pulled off to look back at those two world wars and say, ‘Hey, let’s sing it out.’”
Life is beautiful and life is stupid.
—Space Opera
However, the stakes are a bit higher in Space Opera than in Eurovision since the contest at the heart of Valente’s story is designed to test whether humans (recently discovered by the rest of the universe) deserve to be welcomed into the community of sentient beings or, for the sake of the greater good, be obliterated from existence.
In the end, the job of saving homo sapiens falls to a washed up one-hit former British glam rock band called Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros.
Under the story’s playful surface are messages about diversity and the absurdity of one group claiming innate superiority over others when random luck is the most important factor underlying a species’ survival and success. Space Opera became “a frothy glittery book about rock and roll and comedy that has at its core a dark political vein going through it,” Valente says.
Valente is a fast writer (see her blog post “How to Write a Novel in 30 Days”) and was able to turn the Twitter dare into a manuscript in two and a half months. “If I take much longer, I start to hate myself and the book and don’t finish. I’m really always trying to outrace my own self-doubt. That’s why I write fast. It’s not because it’s fun.”
Her agent worked even faster than she did. He “still calls it the fastest deal in publishing because within 24 hours [of the first tweet] we had a contract.”
January 13, 2019
LitHub Shines Spotlight on My Interview with Peng Shepherd
I’m thrilled and grateful that Literary Hub featured my recent conversation with Peng Shepherd on Lit Hub Radio. Literary Hub’s boost means more people will have a chance to hear about Peng’s debut book and about our efforts at New Books in Science Fiction and the New Books Network to introduce speculative works to a wider audience.
“A shadow is something you share with everyone but you also share with no one. And memory is kind of the same thing.”
On the New Books Network, @pengshepherd talks to @RobWolfBooks about her novel “The Book of M.”
— Literary Hub (@lithub) January 11, 2019
January 3, 2019
Only the Shadow Knows: A Magical Epidemic Steals Memories in Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT3139685230.mp3
The 2019 edition of New Books in Science Fiction kicks off with Peng Shepherd, whose debut novel, The Book of M, tells the story of an inexplicable pandemic, the first symptom of which is losing your shadow.
The initial case involves Hemu Joshi, a man celebrating Zero Shadow Day, a festival in India built around one of the two times a year when when the sun, for a few minutes, is exactly overhead and people’s shadows disappear. In Joshi’s case, when those few minutes are over, his shadow doesn’t return.
This strange occurrence, broadcast worldwide, is greeted with delight until more and more people lose their shadows. When the “shadowless” start losing their memories as well, panic ensues.
Just as the cause of the epidemic seems magical, so is its most powerful consequence: the ability of the shadowless to change the world with the power of their imaginations. As a result, the landscape becomes as beautiful as it is terrifying: deers have wings, clouds tinkle like bells, lakes appear overnight, flowers bloom in winter.
The Book of M offers a complex, compelling narrative that combines mystery, magical realism and dystopia. It has garnered widespread praise, earning recommendations from The Today Show and USA Today, and making Amazon’s list of Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2018. A reviewer on Bustle called it a “post-apocalyptic masterpiece.”
In a world of vanishing memories, Shepherd finds an unlikely hero: a patient with classic amnesia. Unlike the shadowless—who eventually forget everything, including how to speak or eat or breathe—the amnesiac never forgets how the world works. This allows him to take a stand against the seemingly unstoppable pandemic, searching for ways to save the memories of the few who remain.
If the world was plunged into this kind of dream-like forgetting state, nobody would [know the cause], but everyone would have their theories.
Peng Shepherd
The narrative follows several characters on distinct but overlapping journeys: the amnesiac as he searches for answers, first about his own life history and then about the epidemic; Ory, as he searches for his wife, who runs away after losing her shadow; and his wife, Max, who is trying to get as far away from Ory as possible for fear that she might inadvertently harm him with the magical powers of her fading imagination. For several of Shepherd’s characters, the worst thing that can happen to them is losing what they inevitably must: their connection to those they love. “Their greatest fear is the people they care about who’ve lost their shadows [will forget] their love and the memories they have together,” Shepherd says.
The book is mum about the pandemic’s cause—as is Shepherd. “I sort of felt like if this really happened to all of us and the world was plunged into this kind of dream-like forgetting state, probably nobody would [know the cause] but everyone would have their theories. Some make more sense than others.”
December 20, 2018
Sleepless in Karachi: Bina Shah Discusses Before She Sleeps and South Asian Feminism
Listen to the interview ➝
My latest interview on New Books in Science Fiction—and the first to be cross-promoted on LitHub as part of a just-launched collaboration with the New Books Network—is with Bina Shah author of Before She Sleeps (Delphinium Books, 2018).
The novel is set in a near-future Pakistan where a repressive patriarchy requires women to take multiple husbands and become full-time baby makers after wars and disease render women devastatingly scarce. A reviewer in the Los Angeles Times called it a “thrilling novel” with “exquisite” social commentary. Before She Sleeps was also among the books recently highlighted in an article in The Atlantic about “The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia.”[image error]
Before She Sleeps focuses on a group of women who’ve found a modicum of freedom by hiding underground with the assistance of powerful men, for whom they provide clandestine but non-sexual companionship.
The book explores the boundaries of their freedom through an eastern and Islamic lens. “Western readers… are expecting some fantastic Hunger Games-type scenario where the women come out as warriors and just smash the patriarchy. Feminism in my part of the world, in the Middle East and South Asia, is a lot more subtle. We’re dealing with tremendous amounts of misogyny and … gender-based violence. So I think what women over the centuries have learned is not to directly confront that misogyny … but to subvert it, to go around it,” Shah says.
The risks facing outspoken women in Pakistan today are real. Shah’s friend, Sabeen Mahmud, was murdered in 2015. Mahmud had founded a popular café-gallery and meeting space in Karachi that seeks to foster conversations about human rights, diversity, and other topics that are controversial in Pakistan. After the murder, Shah wrote with greater urgency, channeling all her “terrible feelings” over Mahmud’s assassination into the novel.
While some might call Mahmud and Shah activists, Shah resists the label. “We feel like we’re just out there doing our work and saying what needs to be said and telling the truth about what we see in our lives around us and if that’s activism, then OK,” she says.
Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks
November 29, 2018
Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell Shaped Our Vision of the Future but His Views on Race were Stuck in the Past
http://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1225466817.mp3
I do something unusual on the podcast this week. Instead of focusing on fiction, I delve into a non-fiction book.
Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction is the first comprehensive biography of John W. Campbell, who, as a writer and magazine editor, wielded enormous influence over the field of science fiction in the mid-20th century.
[image error]John W. Campbell Jr.
Asimov once called Campbell “the most powerful force in science fiction.” Or as Nevala-Lee explained it to me on the podcast, Campbell’s “interests, his obsessions, and his prejudices really shaped what science fiction was going to be.”
Astounding has been getting positive reviews in both mainstream (e.g., The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post) and science fiction media, which is a testament not only to Nevala-Lee’s skill but to the fact that Campbell’s role in shaping the genre–and his relationship with some of the most famous science fiction authors of the last century–has been little explored until now.
Many people are familiar with Campbell’s name because it’s on the award given out every year by the World Science Fiction Society—the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. This year, the award went to Rebecca Roanhorse, who I spoke with in September. (Other winners who’ve been on the show include Ada Palmer, Andy Weir, and Mur Lafferty.)
From 1937 through the 1960s, Campbell used the magazine Astounding Science Fiction (now named Analog) to popularize science fiction and its potential to predict the future. But Nevala-Lee also unmasks Campbell as someone with “clearly racist” views, which he expressed both in the magazine and privately.
“I’ve heard people say he reflected the values of his time, which I don’t think is actually true,” Nevala-Lee says. “I think he was more racist in some ways than was typical of that era.”
Nevala-Lee quotes a 1957 letter to Asimov in which Campbell asserts that “Africans were the only race never to develop ‘a high-order civilization.'” To the writer Poul Anderson, Campbell wrote that “there were young black girls ‘that I would not allow in my house in any role but that of a serf labor, the role of a pure slave…. They are to be dealt with as one deals with a domestic animal.'”
Even during the civil rights movement, Campbell expressed hateful and ignorant views–for instance, professing that “blacks and whites had different bell curves for intelligence,” according to Astounding. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Campbell failed to encourage or reflect diversity in his magazine’s pages–a crime against readers, writers, and the very genre he sought to expand and elevate.
“He was quite content to keep publishing stories by writers who looked like him… And the characters were almost all white,” Nevala-Lee says. “Campbell thought that maybe black writers weren’t interested in writing science fiction or they weren’t good at it. It never seems to have occurred to him that they might be more interested in writing for his magazine if they saw characters who looked like them.”
“He bears part of the blame for the lack of diversity in science fiction for many of those years,” Nevala-Lee says.
Astounding is a powerful contribution to the history of science fiction, offering fascinating stories about the careers and personal lives of Campbell and his stable of talented and influential writers, including Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard. But its immediate effect may be to spark a conversation about whether the best way to honor today’s emerging talent is with an award bearing the name of a man whose legacy is so problematic. A similar conversation occurred earlier this year over the ; the debate ended when the American Library Association decided to change the name of the award.
“That debate has not yet extended to the John W. Campbell Award. I think it’s a legitimate discussion because Campbell’s opinions on race, in my opinion, are far more offensive than anything Wilder expressed,” Nevala-Lee says.
Thanks to @RobWolfBooks for a great interview about ASTOUNDING for the @NewBooksNetwork / @NewBooksSciFi podcast, which gets at some fascinating issues that I haven’t had the chance to discuss before: https://t.co/NVdVRopBMY
— Alec Nevala-Lee (@nevalalee) November 29, 2018
November 15, 2018
The Feed is Hungry in Eliot Peper’s Bandwidth and Borderless
It seems clear that our dependence on the internet will only grow in coming years, offering untold convenience. But how much control will we have to surrender to maintain access to this digital wonderland?
That’s one of the key questions animating the first two books in Eliot Peper’s action- and idea-packed Analog trilogy.
In the first book, Bandwidth, which came out in May, a single company called Commonwealth controls the digital feed for most of the world. To imagine its power, Peper says, picture all of today’s technology and internet giants “times a thousand.”
Despite its monopolistic control over the world’s information delivery system, it finds itself vulnerable to a clandestine group of hackers and psychologists, who, over many years, covertly and subtly manipulate the feeds of world leaders to influence their thinking about important policies, such as climate change. [image error]
“They’re not creating fake news,” Peper says. “They are actually sorting, ordering, and surfacing true facts about the world in a way that shapes someone’s opinion.”
In Bandwidth, the behemoth corporation finds itself at the mercy of wily hackers, but in the series’ second book, Borderless, published last month, Commonwealth gains the upper hand, using its massive influence to challenge the idea of a nation-state.
[image error]To Peper’s credit, things are never black and white. “I dig out sources of contradiction in day-to-day life and our relationship to technology and the world,” he says in his New Books interview.
Many readers might argue that the goals of the hackers in Bandwidth are good—such as forcing nations to respond to climate change. But these same readers would probably also agree that the hackers’ methods—secretly manipulating individuals’ feeds to change their opinions—violates ethical principles of privacy and autonomy.
The power of Peper’s books is that their world isn’t far from our own. The algorithms that animate Facebook and Google and (and Netflix and Amazon and on and on) are a bit like Peper’s hackers, subtly guiding our thoughts to give us what we think we want while also giving the tech companies what they want (likes, clicks, views, purchases).
The compromises we make with today’s internet seem to exact a low cost. But Peper wants us to stay on our toes. In the afterward to Bandwidth, he says people can remain autonomous by questioning their assumptions and remaining contemplative. “The feed,” he says, “can only define you if you let it.”
The third book in the series, Breach, is scheduled for publication in May.
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