https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR1151734595.mp3 According to Merriam-Webster, noir is “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled, cynical characters and bleak, sleazy settings.” The Cambridge Dictionary says noir shows “the world as being unpleasant, strange, or cruel.” Nick Harkaway‘s new novel Titanium Noir (Knopf, 2023) has all that but with a twist—rather than the fedora-wearing detective hired by a woman who’d just […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN4519264998.mp3 Gareth L. Powell’s Descendant Machine is set about 200 years in the future, and yet the recent explosion in A.I. technology suggests Powell’s imagined future—in which the minds of humans and A.I.s are symbiotically enmeshed—is just around the corner. The Bristol author’s new novel centers around a mysterious machine called the Grand Mechanism, an […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN3520573459.mp3 Leslye Penelope’s latest novel, The Monsters We Defy (Redhook, 2022), takes readers to a version of 1920s Washington D.C. where bootleggers, powerful spirits, and humans blessed (and burdened) with enchantments engage in an epic battle over peoples’ destinies. Penelope’s protagonist, Clara Johnson, is based upon a real person—a woman who, as a teenager during […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8690992323.mp3 Denise Crittendon’s debut science fiction novel, Where it Rains in Color, is set far in the future, long after the Earth has been destroyed, on the planet of Swazembi. Swazembi is a color-rich utopia and famous vacation center of the Milky Way. No one is used to serious trouble in this idyllic, peace-loving world, […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8631369648.mp3 In their new novel, The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz leaps 60,000 years into the future, redefining ideas of peoplehood, democracy and love. A diverse array of characters—hominids, animals, and objects that in 2023 are still considered inanimate, such as doors and trains—are “people” in this multi-generational story about a corporation terraforming their privately-held planet Sask-E […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN6305157066.mp3 In Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion (Orbit, 2022), the setting keep changing—the epoch, location, and technology—but the characters remain more or less the same as they carry out an expedition to a mysterious object at the behest of a private investor. The novel starts on a tall ship in the early 1800s in waters in the […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN1463736781.mp3 People have always cared about their social status and how others perceive them, but advances in technology have changed how we ascend the social ladder, giving us new tools to manipulate our image and new measures of success as we seek “friends,” “likes” and the ever-elusive virality. In Joma West’s debut novel Face, climbing […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN3410067639.mp3 The Women Could Fly is set in our contemporary world with one big difference. A belief in witches gives rise to laws and a culture that encourages women to be married by the age of 30, locking them in a 1950s-style domesticity with the threat that they can be burned at the stake […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8385677875.mp3 One could call The Kaiju Preservation Society a pandemic novel because a) John Scalzi wrote it during the pandemic and b) the pandemic serendipitously leads the main character, Jamie, to a new job that sets the action in motion. But the book is not about the pandemic. It’s about Kaiju, Godzilla-like monsters who live […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2817428611.mp3 Few writers are as qualified to set their book in a circus as Khan Wong, who has not only performed in a circus but is an internationally recognized hula hoop virtuoso. While Wong’s descriptions of acrobats, clowns and fortunetellers are grounded in real life, the pleasure moon that is the setting of his debut […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8530928015.mp3 Tochi Onyebuchi’s new novel Goliath features a phenomenon familiar to those of us who live in cities—gentrification. Like the gentrifiers of today, who push out old-timers with high rents and coffee boutiques, Onyebuchi’s urban colonizers are taking over property in communities that have suffered from underinvestment and systemic racism. But unlike gentrifiers of today, […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5726940521.mp3 Most people believe that when they grow up, they need to “put away childish things”—a wise strategy for holding a job, paying the rent and raising a family. But what if you need to fight a malevolent pirate who threatens to destroy the universe? In that case, a toy War Wizard blaster might come […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN7053556863.mp3 Patricia A. Jackson’s debut novel Forging a Nightmare immerses the reader in a world of menace—fallen angels and demigods whose history of alliances and resentments stretch to the beginning of time. Jackson puts a fresh spin on biblical characters like Gabriel and Lucifer by turning them into FBI agents, a parish priest, a homeless […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN6492642799.mp3 The next world war is 13 years away—that is, if you live in the world envisioned by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis in their novel 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Read an excerpt of our conversation about 2034: A Novel of the Next World War on Literary Hub. When writing about […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN7032018645.mp3 Destroyer of Light is Jennifer Marie Brissett’s long-awaited follow up to her critically acclaimed debut Elysium, winner of a Philip K. Dick Special Citation and a finalist for the Locus and the Tiptree awards. Elysium is set on Earth after people have been wiped out by aliens while Destroyer of Light takes readers to […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN9248018791.mp3 Cadwell Turnbull appeared on New Books in Science Fiction two years ago to discuss his debut novel, The Lesson, about an alien invasion and colonization of Earth, centered around Turnbull’s native U.S. Virgin Islands. He returns in this episode to talk with me about his second book, No Gods, No Monsters, which, rather than […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2863599648.mp3 It’s no coincidence that one of the main characters in S. Qiouyi Lu’s In the Watchful City carries with ser a qíjìtáng, or cabinet of curiosities. Lu’s novella is, itself, a cabinet of unusual mementos, with many smaller objects carefully folded into the larger structure. On one level the plot is simple. The qíjìtáng […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN9238395903.mp3 Jackson Ford has some things in common with his protagonist, Teagan Frost. Both use nom de plumes. And both can move sh*t. With her telekinetic powers, Teagan can move inorganic objects while Ford (aka Rob Boffard) uses his creative powers to move plots at a rapid clip. Ford, and his publisher, Orbit, have also […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5728185596.mp3 Gautam Bhatia’s debut novel The Wall (Harper Collins, 2020) is set in Sumer, a city enclosed in an impenetrable, unscalable barrier that seems sky high. To its inhabitants, whose ancestors have lived there for 2,000 years, the place is more than a city or even a country—it’s their universe. Sumer’s residents know something is […]
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5584019256.mp3 Where does DNA end and the soul begin? It’s a question that Evelyn Caldwell, the brilliant genetic researcher at the center of Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife, never asks as she develops her award-winning technique for human cloning, which takes DNA from “sample to sentience” in 100 days. In The Echo Wife, clones are […]