New Books in Literature

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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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-out. The volume of Passarello’s “Stella!” is a good measure of her curiosity.  Her book takes up sound-centered topics from the rebel yell to the high C, from Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 comeback performance at Carnegie Hall to the chatter of crows.  Along the way, we learn about the psychology, sociology, history, physicality, and humor of the human voice, whether its coming Frank Sinatra, Howard Dean, or a ventriloquist’s dummy, and it all amounts to a celebration of the sounds we create.  As Passarello writes of Brandon: “Stella!” proves that you might have wounded someone you love, you might have woken the neighbors, you might have pushed your voice until it sounds cartoonish and alien, but this scream of yours, if it comes from deep enough inside you, it is your best bet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 together with magic and mechanics, and creating something so imaginative it seems to punch you in the chest. Narrator Professor Harry Ransom is a compelling voice; a teller of tall tales and showman, but whereas the snake-oil salesmen of the American West sold piss and ink, Ransom has a genuine miracle to sell. He is both liar and totally honest in ways that are sly and funny and sometimes tragic. This is a fantastic story of a war and a life told with incredible humanity and pizzazz, by a narrator who, like the world he inhabits, is bold and colorful and a wholly new sort of magic.” Interested listeners might also read Johann Thorsson’s interview with Gilman. A warning: the audio quality of this podcast is on the poor side. I hope that listeners will stick with it nonetheless, as Gilman has fascinating things to say about the themes and ideas at work in The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 burns many of its investors. Most often, the victims of a ponzi scheme either swallow their losses or do what they can to regain some of their money through the courts. Ron McCabe took a different approach and wrote a novel entitled Betrayed focussing on the aftermath of the collapse of a ponzi scheme. Ron McCabe and his wife lost about $1 million in a scheme that supposedly paid investors from the profits of real estate projects in Arizona. In actual fact, investors’ returns – such as they were – came from money flowing in from new investors – the classical ponzi strategy. Overall this particular ponzi scheme took in about 700 investors. The McCabes lost their million dollars and at the age of 65 Ron McCabe felt it was too late to start anew business to make money so he wrote Betrayed (Telemachus Press, 2012), which focuses on the losses of Wally and Poppy Stroud in a ponzi scheme. As a result, Poppy Stroud commits suicide and Wally sets out to get revenge. To research the book McCabe talked to about 200 of the 700 investors in the same scheme and created a cast of fictionalized fraud artists and their victims. I will be talking to him form his home in Mexico about his book and I’ll ask him why there seems to be an increase of books that take financial traumas and wrap them into novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Kahlo, and the haunting faces of old men on the streets of Edinburgh. Moore has brought this expertise and excitement to a new anthology: The Rose Metal Press Guide to Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers (Rose Metal Press, 2012).   It includes contributions by twenty-six writers, who each discussion some element of craft–point of view, for example, or the use of research–along with an exercise for practicing this element and an example of an essay that demonstrates it.  (And here, by way of full disclosure, I should say that I’m one of the 26 contributors.)  The result is both an introduction and exploration of a genre that Moore compare to a forest fire, where, as readers, we’re like smoke jumpers, “one of those brave firefighters who jump out of planes and land 30 yards from where the forest fire is burning.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 as a translator in terms of the broad range of printed and manuscript editions of Mandeville’s text. Over the course of our conversation we spoke about some especially memorable moments in the book, as well as Bale’s approach to rendering this fascinating but challenging work. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 European Space Agency. His novel Chasm City won the 2002 BSFA, and nearly every one of his novels has been shortlisted for a major award. Reynolds is probably best known for his Revelation Space series. He is currently working on a sequel to Blue Remembered Earth and a Dr. Who novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 what might have been a straightforward work of Speculative Fiction into a provocative rumination on objectification, commodification, and the politics of difference. Peter Watts, author of Blindsight, describes Vn as picking up “where Blade Runner left off” and writes that “vN might just be the most piercing interrogation of humanoid AI since Asimov kicked it all of with the Three Laws.” I agree, and am considering assigning vN in my “Politics and Speculative Fiction” course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature