New Books In Literature

While science fiction often seeks to imagine the impact of new science on the future, Rod Duncan explores an opposite: what happens when science remains frozen in the past. In The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter‘s alternate history, the Luddites prevailed in their protests 200 years ago against labor-replacing machinery, leaving science and culture stuck for generations in a Victorian-like age. Against this backdrop, Duncan introduces Elizabeth Barnabus, who outmaneuvers the restrictions placed on her as a single woman by pretending (with the help of quick-change-artist skills) to be her own brother. “Gender identity and gender presentation is a theme that runs through Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter because in order to do certain things in her world she needs at times to cross-dress and do it in a convincing way,” Duncan says. Elizabeth’s mastery of disguise–and her knowledge of deception acquired from her circus-owning father–allow her to earn a living as a private inves

It’s no surprise that when scientists in Ben H. Winters‘ The Last Policeman series declare that a 6.5-mile asteroid is going to destroy life as we know it on October 3, civilization starts to unravel. Governments collapse. People quit their jobs and abandon their families. Survivalists stock up on guns and food, imagining there’s a way to outsmart the impending holocaust. Fatalists sink into hedonism, depression or suicide. And then there’s Hank Palace, a detective on the Concord, N.H., police force and the eponymous star of Winter’s trilogy. Faced with the end of the world, Palace does the almost unthinkable: he keeps doing his job. “He’s taken an oath to uphold the law … and to him an oath is an oath, a promise is a promise, and it doesn’t matter what the context is,” Winters says in his New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interview. Palace remains dedicated to his job as he tries to: determine whether an apparent suicide is actually a murder

Kameron Hurley has been honored for her mastery of numerous forms. Her first novel, God’s War, earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. Her essay “We Have Always Fought”–about the history of women in conflict–was the first blog post ever to win a Hugo Award. And although her tweets haven’t won awards (yet), she is also an animated and articulate presence on Twitter. Hurley has lived with some of the concepts and characters in her newest novel, The Mirror Empire (Angry Robot, 2014) since she was 12. But it took patience and lots of hard work (including multiple revisions) for the story about mirror worlds on the brink of genocidal war to emerge. Although her first book was a success, the other two books in the series, Infidel and Rapture, were hurt by the financial troubles of the publisher. Hurley rallied, finding a new agent and a new publisher, but the path wasn’t easy. As she says in her New Books in Scienc

This week’s podcast was an experiment. Rather than record the conversation with author Alex London over Skype, I decided to take the subway to Brooklyn and meet with him face-to-face in a coffee shop. I found it liberating to be unchained from an Internet connection, which has been known to fail mid-conversation, but the price of having a barista nearby is boisterous background noise. London’s novels about class conflict, debt, and rebellion are set in a grim future. A significant portion of Proxy takes place in a city where the poorest citizens dwell in a violent shantytown known as the Valve while the wealthy thrive in well-guarded neighborhoods of private speedways, luxury homes, and high-tech toys. The sequel, Guardian, is set in a crumbling Detroit exponentially more decrepit than the Motor City of today. As London explains, the horrors of the Valve are his “futuristic re-imagining” of slums outside of Nairobi, which he witnessed while researching one of his non-fiction books, One

Astronomy and astrology once went hand in hand: people studied the location and motion of celestial bodies in order to make astrological predictions. In the seventeenth century, the paths of these two disciplines forked so that today astronomy is a well-established science while astrology is allowed only as close to the word “science” as the suffix “pseudo-” allows. Lydia Netzer, in How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), tries to turn back the clock, inventing a world where astronomy and astrology harmonize once again. The novel centers on two best friends (both astrologers), who conspire to raise their children (both astronomers) so that when they encounter each other as adults, they fall hopelessly in love. All this takes place in the shadow of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, a “world renowned Mecca of learning and culture” that’s as fanciful as Netzer’s fictional Toledo, a city where “astronomers and mathematicians wa

Before Apollo 11, there was Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon. Before the Internet, there was Mark Twain’s short story From the ‘London Times’ of 1904. In other words, before the appearance of many spectacular technologies, a writer imagined it first. This truth underscores one of science fiction’s abiding strengths: its ability to test concepts, both technological and social, without spending vast sums on research and development. The editors and writers behind Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (William Morrow, 2014) think many science fiction writers in recent years have lost their way in this regard. As evidence, they point to the proliferation of what Hieroglyph co-editor Kathryn Cramer calls “tired dystopias.” Rather than provide “cautionary tales that show us what to avoid,” she explains in her New Books interview, these novels use “dystopias as furniture”–backdrops for a plot centered on a central cha

What does it take to be an emperor? That question is at the heart of Brian Staveley‘s debut novel The Emperor’s Blades (Tor, 2014). In this first of a projected trilogy, Staveley focuses on three siblings. They are the children of the assassinated emperor of Annur, a descendant of the Goddess of Fire whose irises look like flames. Kaden, the designated heir, has spent the last eight years training in far off mountains with monks. He’s physically strong and he’s learned to withstand deprivation. He’s also an expert at drawing pictures, capturing images perfectly in his memory and suffering the abuse of his never-satisfied teachers without complaint. But is he ready to take on the responsibilities of emperor, a position that will require him to hold together alliances, manage a large-scale bureaucracy, and foster the admiration of citizens on two continents? In his interview on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Staveley describes the three types of tension that power good s

Science Fiction: 101 (Roc, 2014) isn’t just an “exploration of the craft of science fiction” as its subtitle says; it’s also about the impact the stories in this anthology had on the imagination of a young boy. That boy was Robert Silverberg, who was so inspired by the stories he found in pulpy magazines with names like Startling and Thrilling Wonder that he vowed he would one day become a science fiction writer himself. He sold his first science fiction story in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia and never looked back. But lest anyone think the job of writer is easy, one of the messages of Science Fiction: 101 is that “hard work rather than superior genetic endowment is the basic component of most writers’ success.” The collection contains 13 stories, most of which were published in the 1950s and from which Silverberg, in essays accompanying each story, draws lessons about the art of storytelling. The anthology was originally published under a different name in

Historical fiction, by definition, supplements the verifiable documentary record with elements of the imagination. Otherwise, it is not fiction but history. These elements often include invented characters, made-up dialogue, the filling in of vague or unknowable events and personalities. Through the more or less careful manipulation of historical truth, the novelist seeks to uncover a deeper emotional truth that speaks to both the reality of a past time and the needs of the present. Before and During (Dedalus Books, 2014)–Vladimir Sharov’s exploration of Soviet life and the revolutionary movement that preceded it, skillfully translated by Oliver Ready–pushes historical invention to its limits. Set in a Moscow psychiatric hospital circa 1965, the novel follows a patient identified only as Alyosha as he pursues his self-assigned quest to create a Memorial Book of the Dead, à la Ivan the Terrible, by recording the life stories of those around him and people of importance in his own past. One f

Full Fathom Five (Tor, 2014) the third and most recent novel in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, features dying divinities and depositions, idols and investments, priestesses and poets, offerings to gods and options for shareholders. As he explains in the podcast, Gladstone traces his initial inspiration for his Craft Sequence to, among other things, his several years teaching English in rural China, where he saw children of subsistence farmers grow up to become engineers and international bankers. “The thought that that’s really the kind of range that exists in the modern world sort of blew my mind open,” he says. When he came back to the U.S., Gladstone experienced a kind of culture shock. “Coming back to billboards and advertising campaigns and bank account statements and all of that was this huge shock so I was forced to fall back on interpretive tropes from fantasy and science fiction … to grok it all.” Another influence on his writing was the financial collapse o

Strand a man on Mars with only a fraction of the supplies he needs to survive and what do you get? A bestseller. Andy Weir‘s The Martian (Crown, 2014) has been on a journey almost as remarkable as its protagonist, but instead of surviving on an airless, waterless planet, The Martian has survived the inhospitable environment known as publishing, floating near the top of bestseller lists since the moment it was published. The overall plot is easy to summarize: A manned mission to Mars is scheduled to last 31 days but is aborted in the middle of a life-threatening windstorm. The crew’s botanist-engineer Mark Watney is left for dead as the crew rushes to escape. Watney spends the rest of the book figuring out how to survive while the experts at NASA spend their time figuring out if they can rescue him. Describing Watney’s strategies for survival are a bit more complicated. Everything that remains from the aborted mission is fair game for Watney’s imaginative repurposing. One by one, he tur

History is shaped by cultures interacting either peacefully (through trade or art, for example) or violently, through war or colonialism. There doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid cultural intermixing–on Earth, at least. Science fiction is another story. The crew of Star Trek was bound by the Prime Directive, the United Federation of Planets’ regulation that prohibited Starfleet personnel from interfering in the development of alien societies. James L. Cambias explores a similar idea in A Darkling Sea (Tor, 2014), but rather than accept the Prime Directive as an unexamined good, the narrative tackles the issue from a number of fresh perspectives–three perspectives, to be specific. On one side is a team of human scientists who are trying to study a sentient species under six kilometers of a freezing, alien ocean. On the other side are the Sholen, technologically superior creatures who believe it’s their job to police inter-species interactions. And in the middle are the Ilmataran

It wasn’t until Shelbi Wescott was deep into her career as a high school teacher that she published her first novel, Virulent: The Release (Arthur Press, 2013). The inspiration for the story came during a class for students who weren’t reading at grade level. “Part of my job in that class is to get students excited about literature,” she says. But one student remained disengaged despite her best efforts: I had to call him after class one day and say ‘You actually have to give some of these books a shot. You might like them.’ And he was like ‘I bet you could even write a better book’ than the one we were currently reading. And I said, ‘I’ll take that challenge. Sure. OK.’ She handed the student a piece of paper and asked him to write down 10 things he wanted to see in the book. And then she sat down and wrote it. “That happened when he was a freshman and Virulent was published his senior year. That was a pretty exciting graduation present

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