What work can genre do today? And can the genre system become more than a method of reductive containment and market segmentation—can it be a generative source of imaginative chaos? Few are as qualified to address these questions as Lauren Beukes, whose simultaneous embrace of genres from science fiction to crime to horror and refusal to abide within their borders—what she calls her “Big Fuck You Energy”—has rendered her, by her own account, “basically un-shelve-able.” Beukes is joined by crime fiction scholar (and novelist) Andrew Pepper of Queen’s University Belfast for a conversation that dances across her oeuvre’s many genres. They delve into how Beukes first encountered genre through the allegories that writers used to navigate the apartheid state of South Africa; how Beukes’ experiences of femicidal violence and police apathy inspired her work in genre-bent crime (“At least in novels I get to have justice,” she tells us); the inflection of dystopia from different global perspectives; and the role of speculative fiction in helping clarify political enemies in an age of obfuscation. Pepper and Beukes also think about genre in more practical terms, from the logistics of keeping track of plotlines when crafting time travel or multiverse novels to what it means to be a “high concept” author in a market designed for distracted audiences.

Mentioned in this Episode

• Lauren Beukes, Moxyland, Zoo City, The Shining Girls (and AppleTV adaptation), Broken Monsters, Bridge
  


• Margaret Atwood and speculative fiction


• China Miéville and the New Weird


• Kazuo Ishiguro


• Lauren Berlant


• Ivy Pochoda, These Women


• Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution


• Hannibal Lecter


• Crooked and Obscene


• Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho


• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations


• Rick and Morty


• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse


• Everything Everywhere All At Once


• E.L. Doctorow


• Plotters vs. Pantsers


• Severance


• Nnedi Okorafor


• Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark


• A.K. Blakemore, The Glutton

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