New Books In Literature

It’s clear to most scientists that human activity fuels climate change. What’s less clear is global warming’s long-term impact on geography, ecosystems and human society. If global warming continues at its current pace, what will life be like 50 years from now? A hundred? Five hundred? The further in the future we go, the more we must rely on science fiction writers to help us fill in the details. In her debut novel Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta takes us to a future where the defining consequence of global warming is water scarcity. But more than a portrait of an environmental apocalypse, Memory of Water is about secrets and their consequences: an authoritarian government’s secrets about the past, a family’s secrets about a hidden source of water. The book is also about language. Ms. Itaranta, who was born and raised in Finland and now lives in England, wrote Memory of Water simultaneously in Finnish and English. As she explains in her interview with Rob Wolf, this forced her to

Southern California can seem magical, thanks to sunny skies, warm weather, orange groves and movie stars. In Greg van Eekhout‘s California Bones (Tor Books, 2014) the magic is real. The Kingdom of Southern California is ruled by osteomancers who draw power and wealth from potions derived from the bones of magical creatures. In his conversation with Rob Wolf, the new host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eekhout discusses, among other things, his interest in myths and magic, the impact of his Dutch-Indonesian heritage on his writing, protagonist Daniel Blackland’s complex relationship with his father, and Eekhout’s use of outlines to plot his books. This is Rob Wolf’s debut interview as host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New Y

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.”  But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.”  It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay.  Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before.  Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles.  It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else.  LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing:  Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do.  LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways

Works of fiction sometimes offer unique windows on society, and so it is with Leah Hager Cohen‘s novel No Book but the World (Riverhead, 2014). The story opens with Ava’s search for answers to how her brother Fred has landed in jail, accused of killing a young boy. Having been raised in a Summerhill-inspired alternative education environment along with Fred, Ava’s memories reconstruct for us the making of Fred’s dissonance with the rule-bound world of late twentieth-century America. Cohen provokes our thinking about education and learning philosophies, parenting, and the practice of law. Deeper still, she probes the tangling of childhood experiences with the memories of them and the emotions evoked by past and present.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What’s made you who you are? It’s a straightforward enough question, one that pops up, more or less and with more or less urgency, in most of our lives. And it’s a question for which most of us have straightforward answers: our families, usually, maybe our teachers, or maybe some important personal event–the death of a loved one, the onset of a disease. Sometimes we may nod toward history: the Depression, the Vietnam War, the attack on the Twin Towers. If we grew up on the South Side of Chicago or came of age on a farm in Idaho, we might see those places as crucial to the adults we’ve become. These are the kinds of things we expect to find in memoirs, that genre that tries to makes sense of our experience, in all its vast buzzing complexity and infinitely baffling richness, and tell us the story of a life. Not so with Nicole Walker‘s new book Quench Your Thirst with Salt (Zone 3 Press, 2013). Walker has written a memoir of sorts, but one in which she’s invited in all

In this sequel to Zita the Spacegirl, Zita faces the perils of being a famous space hero. Ben Hatke once again combines whimsical and lovely drawings with a great sense of humor. Although I purchased Legends of Zita the Spacegirl (First Second, 2012) for my daughter, I think that I’ve re-read it nearly as many times as she has. For more information, check out E.C. Myers’ rave review of the series. In this podcast, Hatke discusses his training as an artist, the origins and development of the Zita series, and provides fascinating information into how he conceptualizes and produces all-ages graphic novels.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hugh C. Howey, author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga, is best known for his self-published and bestselling series Wool. This post apocalyptic tale of human survival within the infamous silos has taken the world by storm. The Wool Omnibus Edition (Simon and Schuster, 2012) won the Kindle Book Review’s 2012 Indie Book of the Year award, in addition to making the bestseller lists in both The New York Times and USA Today. In the two years since releasing a series he originally believed “no one would care about,” it’s been picked up by Simon and Schuster for Canadian and US distribution, and film rights sold to 20th Century Fox.  If you have yet to experience WOOL, it’s a recommended must read! In this interview with Michael Zummo, Hugh shares his approach to writing, his endeavors in self-publishing, the origins of the Wool series, along with what’s coming up.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During my first few weeks at college, I concocted one of those dumb ideas that you get when you suddenly have the freedom of an adult without the wisdom of one.  My new dorm-mates and I would go undercover, as it were, and spend a day as prospective students at the famous Evangelical college down the road, Bob Jones University. Since we’d arrived in Greenville, South Carolina, we’d heard all sorts of rumors about Bob Jones: that you weren’t aloud to go out on a date without a chaperon; that the only place on campus men and women could mingle was a giant gymnasium filled with couches, and that you had to keep a couch cushion between you and the other person sitting next to you, presumably to block the demonic energy radiating from his or her genitals.  And, as if this precaution weren’t enough, this gym was spotted with lifeguard chairs, in which guards kept a wary eye out for the slightest chastity infraction.  We imagined the guards had whistles and Ray-Bands. So we went and, as you c

Every time I fly into Chicago at night, I’m amazed by the grid I see out of the portal: those hundreds of thousands of almost identical lots, 25 by 125 feet, that are made visible by the city’s 250,000-odd street lights, block after block, all sprawling westward out of the darkness of Lake Michigan like a dream of Euclidian order. I’m amazed because it’s so unnatural, so not the way we make sense of the places where we live our everyday lives. The grid is the living image of an abstract ideal: that a place can be quantified, cut up, understood, and settled. The truth is very different, especially in a city like Chicago. Places are wild. Their pasts rear up and reveal themselves; their foundations give way. In all their layered complexity, contradiction, and intractability, places are about as quantifiable as people, a fact Barrie Jean Borich makes explicit in her new book, Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Borich sets out to map not only the city of Chicago and the

R.S. Belcher‘s first book, Six-Gun Tarot (Tor, 2013), has receive widespread praise in the online reviewing community. It tells the fantasy-western-horror story of a Nevada town, called Golgotha, that is home to an unusual assortment of men and women, spirits and angels, and Lovecraftian waiting to unleash havoc upon the world. Throughout the book, Belcher retains a light touch, but also manages to explore the nature of coexistence among different ethnicities, faiths, and ways of life. On top of this, he juggles the points of view of a wide variety of characters. You should give it a try.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist who lives in the pacific northwest. His debut novel, Nexus (Angry Robot, 2012), has received an impressive level of positive buzz, including an endorsement from one of our past interview subjects, Alistair Reynolds. Although this is his first work of fiction, Naam is no stranger to writing. His previous book, More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, received the 2005 HG Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism. As he discusses in the podcast, he has two books due out in 2013, including Crux, a sequel to Nexus, as well as a non-fiction work about technological adaptation and climate change, entitled The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. I hope you enjoy the interview, which ranges across all of these subjects.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that iconic scene from the 1951 adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.  Stanley Kowalski, played with dopey brutishness by a young Marlon Brando, stands at the foot of a curved iron staircase, eyes upturned, and belts “Stella!” with what Tennessee Williams calls, in his stage direction, “heaven-splitting violence.”  We all know it, whether we’ve seen it or not.  It’s one of those moments that unmoors from its original context and floats off into our culture at large, showing up in parodies on Saturday Night Live or as good-spirited fun in the Annual Tennessee Williams Stella Shout-Out Competition.  It’s what Elena Passarello calls, in her new collection of essays, a “screaming meme–a unit of vocal culture built to replicate and to travel.” In Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande Books, 2012), Passarello doesn’t merely investigate Brando’s “Stella!”  She lives it.  In 2011, she became the first woman to win the shout-

I first learned about Felix Gilman‘s work from the influential academic blog Crooked Timber. I proceeded to read Thunderer, Gears of the City, and Half-Made World and found myself impressed by Gilman’s distinctive settings, themes, and voice. It should surprise no one, in my view, that Thunderer received a nomination for the 2009 Locus Award for Best First Novel and that it also garnered Gilman a nomination for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award in both 2009 and 2010. Thus, when I agreed to host New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy I immediately contacted him about a podcast on The Rise of Ransom City (Tor, 2012). As a political scientist who works on state formation and international change I found The Rise of Ransom City as masterful account of the coming of modernity–as refracted through a fantastic setting. As Lev AC Rosen writes of it: “The Rise of Ransom City continues Felix Gilman’s brilliant deconstruction of the mythology of the American West, putting it back

As a journalist and author I usually work in factual financial news and analysis. Recently however, I have noticed an apparent increase in books that wrap the real financial tumult of our times into a fictional novel, thereby allowing the author to make a personal statement, blend characters and events and mix real truth with fiction. Before the Barnard Madoff scandal many individuals may not have completely understood the meaning of ponzi. Simply put, in a ponzi scheme a fraud artist creates an illusion of a successful investment and pays returns to investors by using money from subsequent investors, rather than genuine profit actually earned by the investment. The scheme entices new investors with promises of unrealistic returns and needs constant inflows of new funds to keep the fraud in operation. Charles Ponzi became famous – or infamous — for using the scheme in the 1920’s the technique is actually centuries old. At some point, as with Bernard Madoff the scheme collapses and badly burn

In 1997, writer Dinty W. Moore launched a literary journal on a then-novel platform: the World Wide Web.  The journal, which he called Brevity, created a forum for works of nonfiction under 750 words in length.  Since it’s inaugural issue, Brevity has published hundreds of pieces that thrive on the concision and compression demanded of this genre, its almost haiku-like crystallization of literary art.  Brevity has also become the central voice for the genre, one that has its roots in figures such as Heraclitus, Seneca, Montaigne and today includes some of the most interesting writers working in nonfiction.  On Brevity’s blog and in its book reviews and essays on craft are discussions and debates about the nature of what, by turns, has been called the mirco-essay, flash nonfiction, or, in William Makepeace Thackery’s term, an “essaykin.”  Whatever it’s called, it’s a vibrant and fascinating genre, as Moore himself has shown in his own essays on George Plimpton, Frida K

Anthony Bale‘s new translation of Sir John Mandeville’s classic account is an exciting and engaging text that’s accessible to a wide range of readers. The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford University Press, 2012) recounts a fourteenth-century journey across the medieval world, albeit one that was likely written as the result of a voyage through libraries and bookshops. Mandeville (whomever he was – and we talk about this issue in the course of our conversation) offers extended discussions of the “Great Khan” of Cathay and of Prester John’s kingdom in India, peppering his tales with stories of dragons, descriptions of man-eating creatures that were half-hippopotamus and half-human, images of foreign alphabets, and many, many others. Bale’s translation is both fluidly rendered in an easily readable modern English prose, and supported by helpful annotations that situate Mandeville’s stories within a wider historical context, and explain Bale’s choices

Blue Remembered Earth (Gollantz, 2012) takes place roughly 150 years in the future. Climate change, as well as the political and economic rise of Africa, have transformed the planet. Humanity is colonizing the solar system. Geoffrey Akinya, grandson of a visionary businesswoman, cares most about his scientific work with elephants. His sister, Sunday, pursues the life of an artist in an anarchic commune on the moon. But their grandmother’s death sets in motion an interplanetary treasure hunt with the potential to change humanity’s future. Alastair Reynolds‘ latest book has received much critical praise; there’s a sense among some science-fiction writers and fans that Blue Remembered Earth marks an important development in the genre itself. Whatever readers may think of it, Reynolds is a gregarious and fascinating interview subject, and I’m very pleased that he agreed to record this podcast. Alastair Reynolds was born in 1966 in Wales. He holds a PhD in Astronomy and worked at the

Amy Peterson is a five-year old self-replicating android who lives with her synthetic mother and human “father.” Her struggles might be that of any super-intelligent youngster whose body and mind mark her as different than her schoolmates, but then her grandmother, Portia, appears at her kindergarten graduation and attacks her mother. Amy’s intervention leads to a startling result: she eats her grandmother and, in doing so, stores a self-aware fragment of Portia within a memory partition. She soon learns that Portia has a peculiar trait–she lacks the failsafe the prevents Vns from harming human beings. Now Amy must flee for her life while discovering the truth about herself and her inheritance. vN: The First Machine Dynasty (Angry Robot Books, 2012) is Madeline Ashby‘s debut novel. Ashby is a strategic foresight consultant based in Toronto. She holds a masters degree in anime and manga writes on related subjects at io9, BoingBoing, and Tor.com. Her background and skill transform

Lark Ainsley lives within a near-hermetically sealed city located in a world scarred and depleted my magical wars. The Architects, who oversee the City, maintain it by harvesting the non-renewable magical energy found in each of the city’s inhabitants. But something goes wrong on Lark’s “Harvest Day,” and she soon finds herself on a quest to find safety outside the City’s walls–where the disappearance of magic has rendered the landscape a wasteland full of sadness and danger. Skylark (Carolrhoda Books, 2012) is Meagan Spooner‘s debut novel, and the first installment of a planned trilogy. Spooner manages to weave a fresh and clever tale out of familiar elements, and her flair for blending darkness and light makes for a very enjoyable read. She also has some very interesting things to say about young-adult fiction, its place in SF and F, and about the transition from unpublished author to holding contracts for multiple books.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

“D.B. Jackson” is David B. Coe’s pen name for his new historical-fantasy series, The Thieftaker Chronicles. Thieftaker (Tor Books, 2012) centers on Ethan Kaille, a private detective and conjurer, as he investigates a murder in colonial Boston. David, who received a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University before embarking on a career as a novelist, weaves in plenty of period details and historical personages into an alternate Boston where conjuration is real, albeit suppressed by the authorities. David maintains a page of resources for those interested in his well-researched setting. He also is a co-founder of, and co-writer for, a blog dedicated to assisting aspiring speculative-fiction and fantasy authors with all aspects of the craft. Theiftaker has met with excellent reviews, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I enjoyed it a great deal. David proved a terrific interview subject. I contacted him on a whim, and he was very generous to agree despite the channel not even existing