My Heart is Human by Reese Hogan is about a human and robot who come to occupy the same body.

The body belongs to Joel Lodowick, a single parent and trans man whose only wish, at the story’s outset, is to raise his five-year-old daughter in peace. The robot taking up space in his head is Acubens, a bionic that had been “dead” for nearly 10 years until Joel tries to reactivate it.

At first, Joel is excited for the advantages Acubens’ conjoined consciousness confers, like the ability to get a much higher paying job with Acubens’ ability to make numeric calculations with dizzying speed. But when Acubens—professing to have only Joel’s best interests at heart—threatens to erase Joel’s memory as part of an “upgrade,” Joel gets more than he bargained for.

Complicating their relationship is the fact that in this near-future world, all technology has been outlawed. If the authorities discover Acubens has been reactivated—and worse, that Acubens is taking up more and more space in Joel’s mind—they both risk being destroyed.

From the episode:

Rob Wolf: My Heart Is Human isn’t the first great story about a human negotiating a complicated relationship with an artificial intelligence, but what makes your story unique is the context, which is that the book is set about 50 years in the future when the world has dialed back the clock on technology. Humans banned all advanced technology—computers and devices with screens and the like—due to something called the Cyberblood virus. Could you talk about how the technology ban shapes the world your human protagonist, Joel Lodowick, lives in?

Reese Hogan: I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the Cyberblood virus was about the government covering up the truth about sentience and giving an excuse to shut technology down. There were also things I reference in the book—that hackers were running rampant and technology was doing things that it wasn’t supposed to, like implants that people had in their bodies over the years were starting to malfunction and explode and do things like this. But basically, one of the central concepts of the book is humanity has overreached and gone past the point of no return, but not realized it yet. So the government, realizing this was about to happen, that we were right on the brink of it, decided to try to stop before it was too late and they think they succeeded.

Brenda Noiseux: I really love how you explore reactions to sentience from different angles. There’s the government conspiracy, being one of them. And you have these characters like Joel, who have a more everyday perspective of it. What was it like to imagine your characters in that moment and how they react as a human species at that turning point?

RH: That’s a tough question because I kind of feel things out as I go. I think what was really fun about writing Joel in particular is that he is quite the opposite of Acubens. Joel is not a scientist working with the technology who understands what was going on. Joel understands nothing. Not only did he not work with this stuff at all, but he has different ideas about how to live his life.

The artistic angle that I bring into the book was fun because Acubens understands nothing about art and sees it as superfluous or not necessary. But to Joel, music is his life. It creates this weird dichotomy between them, where they’re on different pages with just about everything. So, as with any character, when you’re developing how they’re going to react to stuff, you look at what’s most important to them. That’s how I felt my way through it with these two characters. What’s important to Acubens? What’s important to Joel? And how do these things start clashing more and more?

RW: Can you tell us a bit more about Joel? He’s raising a daughter on his own since the death of his partner, and he’s finding his way as a trans man. There’s a bit of a parallel process here, I think, where Acubens is finding his way in the world and gaining consciousness, and Joel is finding his way in a very different sense.

RH: Joel is a transgender man. He’s only 22. He became a father at 17. And his former partner died of a drug overdose. Joel was in one of those downward spirals that people tend to get into when they aren’t happy with their lives. He was a transgender person who wasn’t out yet, looking for answers in all the wrong places, and ended up with a daughter too young, and then the ex died. He’s come out about two years prior to the start of the book, but his parents are still not getting it. He told told them, and they said “okay,” and then they didn’t change the pronouns or names or anything.

This was kind of based on my own experiences back in 2020 when I came out when Covid hit. There was a lot going on in the world and in my life. Everything was brushed aside, and it was really, really hard. I would escape into my room to write this book and it became a place to put all these thoughts.

Joel is also a musician. He plays bass guitar, and he had to give up that dream when he became a single parent. So that’s something he also struggles with. His life’s really tough. So that’s why when Acubens comes along and offers some answers, it was very, very appealing.

They’re kind of taking these journeys together. Acubens, as you said, is also exploring identity, but in a different way. It knows it’s not human, but it’s studying humanity in such a way that it is finding parallels. And Joel tries to explain humanity and why relationships and are so important, why you can’t just erase a brain because it’s going to erase a life. It’s not just data, right? If Joel can’t find a way to make Acubens understands why his daughter’s life matters and why his life matters, he’ll lose everything.

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Reese Hogan is a transmasc science fiction author of four novels. His short fiction has been published in The Decameron Project, A Coup of Owls, and on the Tales to Terrify podcast, as well as in two anthologies. In addition to writing, Reese enjoys singing in the local gay men’s chorus and running. He lives with his two children in New Mexico.

Brenda Noiseux and Rob Wolf are co-hosts of New Books in Science Fiction.

Em X. Liu’s The Death I Gave Him is a queer, locked-room science fiction mystery inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Working at Elsinore Labs, Hayden Lichfield and his father are in relentless pursuit of the cure for mortality. The night of Hayden’s breakthrough should be cause for celebration until he finds his father murdered. As he flees with the research, his uncle puts Elsinore Labs on lockdown. Trapped inside with only 4 other people, old secrets, alliances, and lies are revealed. When the murderer starts to look like Hayden, he leans on his only ally, the laboratory’s AI, Horatio.

“Hamlet is one of those stories that we keep telling ourselves,” says Liu. “ Certainly I was aware of the idea that people would be coming into this with some preconceptions;  I think that’s inevitable. I tried to make certain choices that did kind of in an attempt to destabilize your relationship to the original text.”

From the episode:

Brenda Noiseux: How would you describe an overview of The Death I Gave Him?

Em X. Liu: I would describe it as like a near-future science fiction retelling or reimagining of Hamlet. I describe it that way because the inception of the novel really came from retelling or receiving Hamlet in this specific way. The sort of fun parts of it is that it’s set in a lab, in a locked lab over 24 hours. It’s kind of a murder mystery, kind of an emotional thriller. And, ultimately,  I would really describe it as a character study.

BN: Oftentimes we think of Hamlet as just a tragedy, so that’s an interesting take. Why did you decide to do a locked room thriller, murder mystery?

EXL: If you approach the story of Hamlet and you go in blind, so to speak, you essentially are approaching it as a murder mystery. Part of the central tension of the play is whether or not Hamlet is mad, whether or not he’s telling the truth, and whether or not he can trust what he has seen. Approaching as an audience where you don’t have any previous expectations of the story, you have to approach it from the way where we don’t know how much of what we’re seeing is true. And that really puts you in that same mindset as Hamlet in the play.

BN: We normally see in sci fi is a lot of this all knowing or all powerful AI that’s controlling ships or controlling worlds. You actually see something a little more fragile and a little more human.

EXL: A big preoccupation of the novel is that idea of what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a person? Is that the same thing? What does it mean to be like a person with consciousness but without a body? And then, conversely, what does it mean to be trapped inside a body? I really wanted Hayden and Horatio, respectively, to act as mirrors to each other, influence each other, and change and grow alongside each other along those themes

BN: One of the things I really enjoyed about your book is how that inexplicable draw of Elsinore Labs, almost as a character, this kind of gravitas, in the background. Everyone has this inexplicable draw to it. And can you escape it and is it something you escape?

EXL: I love setting as character. I think creating a vivid setting is so important in immersing yourself in the atmosphere of a story. I  wanted Elsinore to have that slightly clinical and yet, something irresistible, is a good word for it, about it. The image that I had in mind is this image of Elsinore on the water and it’s dark out. The water is so dark, it  looks almost black. Elsinore is just there in the distance and it’s lit up, because it’s always lit up, because there’s always something going on inside it. And you see that across the pier and it calls to you. It draws you across the water.

BN: Let’s talk a little bit about Felicia and  how much agency you’ve given her in this book.

EXL: I think there is a  tendency to cast that character as someone who is slightly historical or a bit too emotional or acting on impulse and madness in a way that some of the male characters who have similar archetype, similar experiences, wouldn’t necessarily be described that way. What I wanted to do with Felicia is create a character who was emotionally volatile because she is in some very stressful situations. And is actively drawing together some parallels between her and Hayden because they go through pretty similar things on a narrative stance. They both again are “big emotions” people and they both process in their own way.

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Em X. Liu is a writer and recent biochemistry graduate, which means they love stories about artificial intelligence and Shakespeare in equal measure. Since immigrating to Canada, they never go long without hopping on a plane to wander new places. But out of all the cities they’ve been to, they still love their home in Toronto the most.

Brenda Noiseux hosts New Books in Science Fiction.

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 new novel Titanium Noir has all that but with a twist—rather than the fedora-wearing detective hired by a woman who’d just as soon stab you in the back as love you, the first-person narrator is P.I. Cal Sounder, hired by the police to help investigate the murder of a 7’8”, 91-year-old man who by all rights could have lived several more centuries.

Sounder’s specialty is investigating crimes against Titans, the one percenters among one percenters, whose access to an exclusive medical treatment known as Titanium 7 enlarges both their bodies and their lifespans.

The story is set hundreds of years in the future, when such miracle treatments become possible, but the book also sends roots into the past. The murder weapon, for instance, is a .22 Derringer, a small handgun not too different from the weapon used to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

“Killing someone with a gun is noir. Every poster of a noir movie is someone with a gun, whether it’s a shadow with a revolver or a kind of Rico Bandello in Little Caesar. The gun is bound up with noir and vice versa,” Harkaway says.

From the episode:

Rob Wolf: Stefan Tonfamecasca controls something called Titanium 7. Tell us about Stefan and Titanium 7.

Nick Harkaway: Stefan is the big guy—I mean, literally huge because when you take Titanium 7, not only do you get younger—it resets your physical age to about 17—you also get 20 percent bigger each time you take it, and all the super-rich take it. Your Musks and Zuckerbergs all end up after two- three- four hundred years being 14 feet tall and commensurately broad.

They’ve become physically immense. And Stefan is the original Titan. He’s either invented it or he bought the company that invented it, but no one knows which because this information is, to some extent, lost in the mists of time. The only way you would know the answer would be through history, which by definition, if you’re a Titan, you control or can edit.

RW: It’s interesting that you talk about the Titans being the preservers of memory because Titanium 7, when it rejuvenates them, can also damage their memories, which makes for an interesting crime story.

NH: This is part of the game for me. What you have is an unreliable history in every direction. If the record belongs to the very wealthy and the very wealthy can’t be depended on to remember things, you have an interesting societal disconnect.

Brenda Noiseux: The Titans are so distant from the non-Titans and part of that may be because these are the ultra-wealthy and they’re only 2000 of them in the world. Is this a commentary on immortality or did you have other designs in mind?

NH: It’s not an on-purpose discussion of immortality. I always think there’s an immediate rush when people start writing about longevity treatments that there’s something wrong with that, that it comes with inherent disadvantages, that it distances you, and it takes you away from who you really are. And I always find that a little bit frustrating. At the end of the animated movie of Hercules, Hercules has to decide whether or not to become a god, and I’m kind of like, say yes because you can then do incredible things for your friends. It’s not necessarily a zero sum game.

With the Titans I gave a soft limit on how long they can go on taking the drug because when you’re telling a fantastical story like this, you have to indicate the boundaries. There have to be rules which you can lean into because you’re otherwise in impossibly unfamiliar territory. So the thing is, if you make a human frame bigger and heavier, there’s no way that guarantees perpetual expandability. Really large animals in our gravity using one heart have a limit on how big they can be. That’s why whales live in the ocean, not rolling around on grassy plains somewhere, and why the dinosaurs had different ways of dealing with scale. So the square-cube law applies. It’s not purely me malevolently saying there’s a downside to extended mortality. It is about recognizing the limits of the real.

BN: Were there elements of noir that were a must-have for you or any elements that you wanted to stay away from?

NH: I realize increasingly that as I write, the first thing that I need is the mood. The mood defines the edges of the world. It tells me what the character is going to be like and so on. And I wanted this to have that feeling of shadows and cynicism and the possibility of better things, which you have to constantly strain for and you maybe never get.

There’s a kind of grotesquerie of violence in some noir fiction which I can’t go to. I can edge up against it and I can indicate it. … but it’s not where I’m comfortable. So there’s this sense of not quite going all the way into the shadows, however dark it becomes. There’s always a way back.

RW: What was it like having a dad (John le Carré) who was very successful as a writer? Did you share your writing with him? Did you compete with him?

NH: I can’t answer that question because I never had anybody else for a dad. So I don’t know what it would be like not to have that. Did we compete? No. I mean, how could you? But did he perceive competition between us? Weirdly, yes, absolutely. He went and did an event at Cambridge University. He was an amazing performer. He was one of those people who can absolutely captivate a room. And after this event, one of the tutors came up to him afterwards and said, “I’m such a fan. I loved hearing you speak. And if I could make so bold, I also read your son’s book and I loved it.” And he was like, “Oh, that’s marvelous.” And he came home and he was grumpy for days. My mother was howling with laughter. She was like, “You have to give him this one. It’s not like that changes the fact that everyone thinks you’re a megastar.”

He wasn’t being ungenerous. He was just terrified. I was like, “Are you kidding? Have you seen, the Golden Daggers and others awards dotted around the house?” It was a kind of a goofy moment between us. But I could tease him about it. He knew it was ridiculous, but he kind of still felt it, which was charming. Did we ever talk about writing? Very rarely directly. He never sat me down and gave me a masterclass. It wouldn’t have occurred to him. He would have thought that was terribly rude. He would have said it would spoil my writing because he could only talk about how he wrote, not how I wrote.

Did I show him my work? Absolutely. He always claimed to have looked at it, but usually claimed not to have properly read it. My brother Simon said to me recently that, “Yeah, sure, he claimed not to have read it, but he was remarkably well acquainted with everything that happened in your books.”

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Nick Harkaway is the pen name of Nicholas Cornwell. As Harkaway, he is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker (which was nominated for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke award), Tigerman, Gnomon; and the non-fiction The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He has also written two novels under the pseudonym Aidan Truhen.

In science fiction, aliens who come to Earth are usually scary and menacing, aspiring to destroy, conquer, or even eat mankind. But the aliens in Karen Lord’s The Blue, Beautiful World aren’t interested in conquering or destroying; they’re interested in inviting Earthlings to join a Galactic Council.

It turns out, however, that humans need a little time and training before they’re ready to assume the responsibilities of galactic citizenship. And complicating matters is the fact that humans might not be the only Earth dwellers to receive the aliens’ invitation.

It’s not surprising that water and oceans figure prominently in Lord’s novel. As a Barbadian writer, she has a lifelong respect—and fear—of the water.

From the episode:

Rob Wolf: We meet Owen at the beginning of the book. He is a pop megastar, but unlike most megastars of today, who expose their every breath on social media, he’s a bit of a mystery. Tell us a little bit about Owen. Who is this mysterious pop star?

Karen Lord: My first reaction is “spoilers.” It’s going to be so hard to talk about Owen, but let’s talk not so much about who Owen is as what Owen is capable of. He is someone who has absolutely tons of charisma. The talent is there, but the talent is not outstanding. But there’s this amazing charisma, and one of the things I have really noticed about history—I notice even about the present day—is that people with charisma can be really dangerous because they can get some things done that you just would not expect. I will leave the readers to discover for themselves Owen’s background and why that’s so important. The whole journey that Owen has and the temptations that he faces, I found that fascinating.

RW: In addition to Owen, the story involves a group of young people who’ve been recruited to be trained as diplomats for a global government. They’re at first not sure why a global government needs diplomats since, under one government, there will no longer be nations with separate interests. Why is the knowledge that they gain during their training so important to what unfolds in the story?

KL: In the introduction, you mentioned “the aliens have always been here,” which is a lovely trope that keeps recurring in science fiction. Another trope that keeps recurring, and that I have always enjoyed, is the “young person plays a game and discovers that the game is a cultural tool to introduce them to aliens who actually exist.” This is my take on that, although it’s not, strictly speaking, a game; it’s really their teaching module where they’re like, ‘Oh, here’s a random scenario. … How do you deal with this? How do you analyze this? How do you assess this?’ At first they don’t take it very seriously because if you’re on Earth and you don’t think other populated planets exist with intelligences that could interact with ours, it’s a bit of a silly exercise, isn’t it? I mean, you understand that it has some kind of meaning on some level, but you’re not taking it as real. This was something that I could have a lot of fun with, especially when they do start to realize, much to their horror, that it is entirely real.

RW: That ties into another theme—the notion of what’s real and what isn’t real. This is a world where there’s a lot of interaction occurring in virtual reality, and there’s a company that change the way you look, change your identity. There’s also times when people are dreaming or are awake but still feel like they’re dreaming. It’s a beautiful mosaic of the way people can interact and experience the world, but it makes me wonder, and some of the characters also wonder, how can they tell what’s real and what isn’t, what is true and what isn’t. It seems very relevant to the way we live today and some of the issues we’re confronting. So what are you telling us? And what are your characters experiencing by living in this kind of environment?

KL: I did indeed sort of riff off of the dilemmas we face now with, as you say, deepfakes and AI voices and the rest of it. But, as you point out, there’s also an almost supernatural or spiritual element where sometimes in their dreaming or in a waking moment, there’s other dimensions going on. There’s still non-mechanical, non-computer, non-digital aspects of reality that are not something that we can fully trust.

As to where I was trying to go with that, I think sometimes we all have to take a step back and understand that everything that we see as the world and as reality is mediated through our five senses. Even between humans, we don’t really, literally experience the world the same way.

So sometimes what becomes important is not so much the extent to which your reality is … real, but more whether if it is shared. It’s the sharing of the reality that makes it more powerful than the question of whether it’s real or not.

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Karen Lord is a Barbadian writer of speculative fiction. The Blue, Beautiful World is her fifth novel. Her previous books are Redemption in Indigo, which received the William L. Crawford and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. That was followed later by a sequel, Unraveling. While The Blue, Beautiful World is considered a standalone story, it is set in the Cygnus Beta universe, which is where two of her previous books, The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, are also set.

Emma Mieko Candon’s The Archive Undying imagines a relatable trajectory for a world with AI and artificial general intelligence, including a fresh take on the beauty it could create and havoc it could cause.

When the massive AI running the city state of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. But in its death throes, this functional god brought one thing back to life: Sunai. Sunai has been unable to die, unable to age, and unable to forget the horrors he’s experienced. For twenty years, he’s run as far as he emotionally can, but when Sunai wakes up in the bed of the one man he never should have slept with, he finds himself on a path straight back into the world of gods and machines.

Candon’s personal perspectives on recovery, residing in the cultural community of Hawaii, and being fourth generation Japanese deftly shape the story giving readers a distinctive science fiction world filled with non-human centric language, a deep sense of cultural compassion, and a protagonist’s skill with cooking spices.

From the episode:

Brenda Noiseux: One of the things that drew me to this book was that it felt like a relatable trajectory of AI, this idea of how much machines are helping us and working with us and assisting us in our lives right now. In that trajectory, I could definitely see AI running cities and taking care of humans and maybe experimenting with them a little bit or being possessive of them. Then you have this twist that it’s in the past now. Now it’s the aftermath. What were you thinking in terms of building a world like that?

Emma Mieko Candon: I have, I think, a pretty concrete answer to this. I started writing this in the aftermath of a master’s degree in clinical psychology during which Ihad become quite irritated with essentially capitalist AI doomsday mythology; that the AIs we have right now are on the verge of sophisticated human thought, which they are not. ChatGPT is absolutely is not and everything we’re calling AI is just a sophisticated algorithm. It’s nothing like a human brain.

Anything that did operate like a sophisticated human brain would not be driven by capitalist ideals, necessarily, unless you put those ramifications into its programming, but if it were to behave like a human, if it were to think in any way that is cognitive or sapient in ways that we recognize, it would be fundamentally an emotive being. I wanted to imagine what it would mean for an artificial entity that is truly thinking. It had to be driven by its own feelings and sensations and thoughts about the world and about people.

Brenda Noiseux: Our main protagonist, Sunai, how would you describe him?

Emma Mieko Candon: Feeling wise or his condition in the world? Here’s a person who we meet and one of the first notes that my editor makes is, “Ah, yes, this is what they call a disaster queer.”

He’s in a body that cannot be killed in any meaningful way. But he is very broken, very hurt, very wounded in all these ways that he either refuses to recognize or does recognize and refuses to address because doing so feels like it will only deepen the pain in some way. Welcome to your protagonist. I hope you have fun. He’s at least funny about it.

Brenda Noiseux: That comes through with a lot of your characters, the complexity of their pain and their trauma and their off-ness. The complexity, but also how deeply compassionate they are to people even they don’t necessarily know and how empathetic they can be, even when they’re in this place of pain or loss or self-sabotage.

Emma Mieko Candon: That tendency toward care. It’s actually an articulation of this as a recovery book because I was thinking through a lot of things about how my own survival came about, which is a consequence of certainly my doctors, but in huge part because of my family and my wife and all the friends who ever took time out of their lives to hang out with me. I wanted this to be a world where people had this advanced cultural understanding of and compulsion toward care for people and their basic frailties.

Brenda Noiseux: We’re making it sound so nice and lovely, but it’s actually very brutal under the authoritarianism of the Harbor. They have these mechs who are also very brutal in how they handle any interaction with any citizen regarding anything. There is no room for compromise with the Harbor because every interaction is just amped up. How did you kind of come up with this idea of brutality in the ruling?

Emma Mieko Candon: Let’s talk a little bit about Japan. I’m a fourth generation Japanese and part of that for me has involved grappling with the different elements of Japanese history, both in Japan and for Japanese Americans. My family has its own specific relationship with internment.

Simultaneously, Japan was being an empire in its own right. Japan committed incredible brutalities against China, against the Philippines, in Indonesia, all up and down the East Asian seaboard and down into Southeast Asia. This is a thing that I feel a kind of need to grapple with personally because I think it’s deeply tied into the way that Japanese culture as a literary and film tradition has grappled with violence in the aftermath.

In the midst of all this violence that they are perpetrating, they experience one of the greatest brutalities humanity has ever suffered twice in a row with atomic bombs. So you get this population that’s deeply, deeply traumatized by violence. It suffered, but is also responsible in some cultural regard for carrying the history of the brutalities it visited upon people. You’ll notice when you’re reading Archive that the Harbor and its original city state, all of the language that it uses, is very much Japanese adjacent.

And mecha itself is very much tied to this war trauma coming out of Japan in the aftermath of World War Two. That’s what the Harbor is, right? It’s this group of people, after suffering one of these corruption events where their AI dies in a terrible way, decide we can never trust these entities again. They build out of its remains machines by which they can protect themselves from the wild robots roaming about and from any AI that might want to claim its citizens for itself.

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Emma Mieko Candon is a queer author and escaped academic drawn to tales of devouring ghosts, cursed linguistics, and mediocre robots. Her work includes Star Wars Visions: Ronin, a Japanese reimagining of the Star Wars mythos, and The Archive Undying (2023), an original speculative novel about sad giant robots and fraught queer romance. As an actual cyborg whose blood has been taken for science, Emma’s grateful to be stationed at home in Hawaii, where they were born and raised as a fourth-generation Japanese settler. By day, they edit anime nonsense for Seven Seas Entertain­ment, and by night they remain academically haunted by identity, ideology, and imperialism. At all hours of the day, they are beholden to the whims of two lopsided cats and relieved by the support of an enviably hand­some wife.

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 impenetrable black sphere, which, about two thousand years ago, replaced a star in a binary system. The system is home to a humanoid, multi-armed species known as the Jzat, who are divided among those who want to crack open the Grand Mechanism, believing it contains a wormhole to connect them with a more advanced Jzat civilization, and those who want to leave the mechanism alone, fearing it contains a black hole or other existential danger.

“I got a bit satirical with the way the faction is appealing to nationalism to get the power they need to open this thing by promising sunlit uplands and making Jzat great again,” Powell says. “It’s like any scientific experiment, any scientific knowledge that sentient beings see. It’s a process of just poking stuff to see what happens. Chimpanzees do it, and crows do it. You find something you don’t understand, you poke it and try and break it and see what it can do. And that’s how we learn. And that’s what’s basically happening on a massive scale in this story with this ancient machine that nobody knows what it does, but they want to poke it and see what happens.”

From the episode:

Rob Wolf: What do we know about the Grand Mechanism?

Gareth L. Powell: The Grand Mechanism is the mystery at the heart of the novel. It’s the locked room. If you’ve ever seen Ronin … it’s all about all these people trying to get hold of this briefcase and nobody actually knows what’s in it, but everybody wants it… The Grand Mechanism is the engine that drives the plot because there’s one faction that wants to open it to see what’s inside, and there’s the other faction who thinks that could be a really, really bad idea. For most of the book, we’re not sure which it is. It’s like a Schrodinger’s cat experiment of catastrophe.

RW: It reminded me a little bit of debates we have about technology. Everyone’s so nervous about A.I. right now. It’s happening so fast, and some people are saying “slow down, don’t do it,” and others are saying, “we have to go forward, this is good.”

GP: Yeah, it’s like any scientific discovery. From when we first learned how to harness fire, we could use it to cook or we could use it to set people we didn’t like on fire. It’s the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the ape picks up that antelope thighbone and immediately starts whacking stuff with it. Anything can be used for good or bad.

RW: Descendant Machine is framed as an investigative report about what transpires with the Grand Mechanism. The author is the Frontier Chic, a sentient spaceship, who decides to write it as a work of fiction because humans find it easier to absorb fiction than a dry summation of events. Are you trying to tell us storytelling illuminates truth better, or just holds our attention better, but we can’t rely on it necessarily for truth?

GP: Some of that and some of the fact we are a narrative species. We pretty much assume language evolved when one Homo erectus wanted to tell the other one, “You should have seen the size of that tiger than nearly ate me.” Everything—our whole society, our history—is stories. Every tradition, every social change has got a story attached. We need a beginning, a middle and end, we need a why, we need a motivation in order to understand things. And if we just, as you say, get a dry recitation of facts, we seem to find it very hard to put that into the right kind of understanding. But if we get told a story, then we get it. We empathize with it, we understand it.

. Brenda Noiseux: I thought it was cheeky that it was a report written in novel format, and I thought, “Okay, this is fun. I can get behind this.” I’m curious though, why did you even feel to go that route? Because you are writing a novel. The novel itself, you know, stands on its own without that the introduction and ending that make it a report.

GP: I was messing around, and it struck me as it would be a fun thing to do. It’s been about 50/50 well received and not well received as a framing device by reviewers. But I just thought it would be quite fun to have the ship at the beginning going, “This is a report into why what we tried to do was a complete disaster.” And so the reader sets out thinking, “Oh, how is this going to be a disaster?” and it sets some expectations.

RW: So you’re a writer who reads reviews? Some writers don’t go there.

GP: There are writers who read reviews and then there are liars. I can’t believe there are writers who don’t read any reviews at all. I don’t go on Goodreads or anything because that place is just not designed for writers, really. It’s  more for readers, and they should have a space where they can sound off and talk about things.

But I do read the ones in online blogs or review sites, ones written by reviewers as opposed to ones written by readers, if you see what I mean, just to get an idea of how it’s being received, because those are the reviews that probably my editor, my publisher, other editors and publishers will see and take note of. So if there’s a review in a magazine, I’ll read that one, but I won’t go trawling through the comments on Amazon because, you know, that can be a bit like Forrest Gump‘s mum’s box of chocolates. You just never know what you’re going to get.

The ones that are written by critics and reputable review sites and stuff I’ll take a look at because it’s always good to get some feedback because otherwise I’m just writing in a vacuum and I don’t think that’s healthy because I’m trying to write stories that people enjoy and people want to read and want more of. So if I’m kind of disappearing up my own fundament, then I’m going to, at some point, lose the audience.

BN: I was curious if you were inspired at all by the conversations we’ve been having around artificial general intelligence. The A.I.s in your book, in a lot of ways, feel more like what we’re aiming towards—a human component working with an A.I. component, and both are benefiting each other because neither can excel or go to the next level without the other.

GP: Obviously this was written before all this kind of huge take off in A.I. talk hit the mainstream. We need to distinguish between things like ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, which are two completely different things. ChatGPT is just like the predictive text on your mobile phone, just a bit more complicated; it will scan through what it’s being fed off the Internet and predict sentences based on what you ask it to do. And I find that really annoying. I know other writers who have lost jobs already because copyright companies are thinking, “Oh, we can save a bundle on copywriting,” … which I think is ridiculous because these things do contain mistakes.… Eventually we’re just going to have these A.I. machines writing articles to get clicks from other machines who will write articles to get clicks from other machines, and it’ll just be this automated click thing and humans will be bored out of our tiny minds.

Actual thinking, conscious machine intelligence, I am completely torn on. On one hand, I’m really, really excited about the idea. On the other hand, I’m really, really frightened about the idea. It depends what we do with it. And the trouble with human beings is, as I said earlier, we’re curious and we’re a little bit impulsive. We tend to do stupid things when we invent something new. So are we going to hook it up to the nuclear launch codes to see what happens? …

There’s the perfectly rational argument that the A.I. might look around and see how chaotic we are and think, “I am stuck on a planet with chaotic, heavily-armed monkeys. The best thing I can do for my survival is wipe them all out.” Or it might be super-intelligent and realize that cooperation and stewardship and compassion are the way forward because it realizes that in the whole of eternity, life is incredibly rare and precious. So who knows? It could go any way.

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Gareth L. Powell is known for using fast-paced, character-driven science fiction to explore big ideas and themes of identity, loss, and the human condition. He has twice won the coveted British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel and has become one of the most-shortlisted authors in the 50-year history of the award, as well as being a finalist for the Locus, British Fantasy, Seiun, and Canopus awards.

Brenda Noiseux and Rob Wolf are co-hosts of New Books in Science Fiction.

Denise Crittendon’s debut science fiction novel, Where It Rains In Color, leads us to the planet of Swazembi, a blazing, color-rich utopia and famous vacation center of the galaxy. Set far in the future, this idyllic, peace-loving world sees no real trouble. But Lileala’s perfect, pampered lifestyle is about to be shattered.

The book deliberately plays with concepts of color and beauty. Tourists are drawn to Swazembi for its floating color vapors, its wind-force transit system, and the most beautiful woman in the galaxy, the Rare Indigo.

“We love colors when we see beautiful flowers,” says Crittendon. “We love colors when we see birds that are incredibly colorful and neon. So why wouldn’t we love seeing colors floating across the surface of the planet? I wanted to show that we enjoy color so much. As I was writing the novel, my thought process was, So you don’t like color, huh? You don’t like people of color, huh? Well, you know, check this out. Look at all these colors.”

From the episode:

Rob Wolf: Let’s talk about the main character, Lileala. She’s been chosen to receive a very select title, The Rare Indigo. But when we meet her, she hasn’t actually been formally inducted into the position. What is the Rare Indigo?

Denise Crittendon: The Rare Indigo was considered the most beautiful woman in the entire galaxy. She’s this icon. In our society she would be known as a beauty queen. This role of Rare Indigo is a coveted title and she was selected. She’s been groomed most of her life for this position and there are strict restrictions. She’s a little frustrated. She’s a little immature. She’s spoiled. She’s pampered. So we show her starting out in that capacity as someone who’s privileged and entitled and a little bit whiny at times.

Rob Wolf: She’s a Black woman, but she can also generate colors on her skin. Could you talk a little bit about the significance of those colors that she’s generating and mesmerizing people with and luring the tourists to the planet?

Denise Crittendon: I played with skin tone, and I made her as dark as she could possibly be. She’s blue black. Blue black was once a term, and maybe it still is. In some communities, that was used as an insult. You call someone they’re so black, they’re blue. That was not supposed to be a compliment. Well, I flipped it. I made it a compliment because I was a little tired of Black women, women of color, being the lowest on the totem pole.

You’ll see in other parts of the world, if women have this rich hue, they’re kind of pushed back at times. And it does not make any sense. This is absolutely ridiculous, so I was showing how ridiculous it is. I have this protagonist whose skin is so brilliantly black; it’s like coal mixed with diamonds. She can do something called shimmer. Her shimmer is one of her greatest glories, and it’s what people come to experience when they come to see the Rare Indigo. When she shimmers, it’s almost hypnotic. People are like spellbound.

Rob Wolf: There is an illness spreading in the story and what makes it so devastating to Lileala in particular, is that it manifests as keloids, which she feels make her ugly and disfigure her. It takes away the thing she values most, the thing that has made her most special. There’s so many different kinds of illnesses, but you chose one that actually destroys beauty.

Denise Crittendon: That came to me in a dream. A lot of the novel, I can say, was inspired by Zimbabwe, but most of it, too, came from this dream I was having, a series of dreams of seeing this woman standing on a cliff, which I now know was the asteroid.  I don’t know how often I have had that dream. I’m not sure. But one night I had this amazing dream and this woman was standing there and she said that these glassy looking beings with large heads and dressed like they were trying to mimic earth attire said, We sentence you to the keloid planet.

It was clear in the backdrop that their belief is that if you want to torture someone or attack someone, you take what is their glory and you use that against them. Well, dark skin has a tendency to keloid when it’s when it’s been punctured or when you have a wound. They were taking what was our gift and using it against us, that that was the whole point of the dream.

Brenda Noiseux: I read a lot of sci fi and fantasy and oftentimes there’s a lot of violence. One of the things that stands out in this book for me is the lack of violence. Was that a conscious choice on your part or did the story happen to avoid violence or not need violence?

Denise Crittendon: It was conscious. It was deliberate. Everyone who knows me knows I can’t take violence. I don’t want to criticize the state of the world in that way but I honestly believe that if we would tone down the violence in what entertains us, the movies, whatever books, that maybe we would tone it down in society. Some people disagree with me for this. What you take in is what you’re going to put out. Because I avoid violence at all costs, I’m ultrasensitive to it. If I go to certain movies and it gets to be too much, I’m in the lobby. So there’s no way that it was going to exist in the world and in any world that I ever create. I deliberately made them a peaceful, peace loving society.

Rob Wolf: It’s very subtle, but it definitely evokes a very different culture that you’ve created this greeting for people. They greet each other by saying “waves of” and, it’s usually something positive, like waves of joy. It has a religious quality to it. I felt like it came from somewhere that I’m just ignorant of, but it could also have come from one of your dreams. That kind of thing goes a long way to evoking a very different sense of place and culture.

Denise Crittendon: You know, energy travels in waves, so I wanted it to be that they’re in touch with waves. I was invoking that sense of energy and that they understood energy and were tapped into energy. I wanted this to be a society that, in addition to being peaceful, that they’re focused on being happy. So your greeting is waves of joy, waves of peace. And if you’re saying thank you, you might say waves of thanks. And if you’re teasing someone or they’re doing something you don’t like or they’re acting jealous of you, then they’re a light stealer.

Brenda Noiseux: You had mentioned who you’re hoping to reach with Where It Rains In Color, not necessarily just existing fans of science fiction, but some folks who have not necessarily seen themselves in the genre before.

Denise Crittendon: I perceive it as a crossover. I’m hoping that sci fi fans embrace it, even though it’s different from other sci fi books that they may have read and not the type of worldbuilding that they’re used to. I’m hoping that the sci fi community engages, but I’m really hoping that women of color see themselves, especially young women of color.  I think that women of color will pick up the book, enjoy seeing themselves elevated. Put on a pedestal. As I keep saying to people, a woman who was not being admired and revered despite the fact that she’s Black, but a woman who’s being admired and revered because she’s Black. Now, that’s the switch.

Brenda Noiseux: For those  who are looking for a little bit more, you have a friend who inspired you to create a glossary?

Denise Crittendon: A friend called me and said her book arrived. She said  I don’t want to start reading it because I don’t even know how to pronounce these names. I said, there’s a glossary. She said, Yes, the glossary gives you the reminders, the definitions, but it doesn’t tell you how to pronounce it. I said, I didn’t even think about that. And she said, That’s okay, we’ll create one. So she contacted me again and she had me pronounce every single, not every single word in the book obviously, but the difficult terms. So if you go to my website you’ll see a glossary that includes the pronunciation for the terms that might be tongue twisters.

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Denise Crittendon is the author of Where It Rains In Color. Before making the big leap into the world of sci-fi & fantasy, Denise held a string of journalism jobs. In addition to being a staff writer for The Detroit News and The Kansas City Star, she was editor-in-chief of the NAACP’s national magazine, The Crisis. Later, she became founding editor of a Michigan-based lifestyle publication for black families. These days, she fulfills ghostwriting assignments for clients and writes speculative fiction on the side. She divides her time between Spring Valley, Nevada and her hometown, Detroit, Michigan.

Brenda Noiseux and Rob Wolf are co-hosts of New Books in Science Fiction.

Surreal. Emotionally complex. Atmospheric. Soft sci-fi. Body horror. These are all words that have been used to describe Hiron Ennes’s debut novel, Leech.

For hundreds of years the Interprovincial Medical Institute has been taking root in young minds and shaping them into doctors, replacing every human practitioner of medicine. Now, in an isolated chateau, an Institute’s body will discover a competitor: a new parasite is spreading.

Competition isn’t limited to the parasitic creatures alone; the cast of human characters reveals how well-meaning and monstrous they can be as well.

“My goal was to explore the relationship that a parasite might have with its own host if it was trying to be a mutualist, if it was trying to be beneficial to both species. And then as the book went on, the other characters revealed to me the way that they parasitized each other interpersonally in the way that the extractive economy and the resurrection of this capitalist mindset is a parasite on the landscape itself.”

From the episode:

Brenda Noiseux: How did you evolve into it’s not enough just to have one parasitic organism, we need to have another one?

Hiron Ennes: I kind of wanted to explore the ways in which this sentient hive mind parasite would view itself, because essentially it is occupying a whole bunch of human brains. The chemistry of human brains is so complex and so intricate and so much bigger than the sum of its cellular parts. My thought is if I’m a parasite using a human brain to interface with the world, then the physiology of that interface will necessarily affect the way that I adapt and that I think of myself. So I wanted to have dual parasites because I wanted to have a sort of mirror held up to it and explore the different ways that parasitism can appear.

BN: How much hard science was in your brain kicking around as you were writing this book? What stopped you from not putting more of the science in?

HE: That’s a great question. Part of it is laziness, and part of it is that I really did sort of want this to be a bit surrealist, fantastical situation going on. And frankly, I don’t think that a lot of what happens in the book could truly happen. If I devoted myself to realism and hard sci-fi, I don’t think I would have been able to tell the story that I wanted to tell.

BN: Many of the characters in this book each have their own traumas which add these different layers of complexity to everyone having their own internal struggle. How hard was it to choose those different traumas for each of those characters and then kind of weave them back into a full plot for the book?

HE: I can’t tell you much, except that it was hard. There’s a lot of the book about how different people respond to different traumas. Every brain has its own way of adapting. And not only are we shaped by our experiences, but also our neuroanatomy and our genetic predispositions and our own, you know, internal processes that we honestly are only beginning to fathom.

BN: Did you write the characters and they expressed their kind of trauma to you? Or did you go old school and spreadsheet? Or maybe, like that meme with the red yarns on a pin board?

HE: I would say that it’s very much a red red string on a pinboard situation with me. I wish I could do spreadsheets that well, but I have this habit, especially for worldbuilding stuff, I do a lot of notes. I have like a fully separate document for everything that is just like notes, timelines, sometimes family traces of necessary linguistic stuff, in this case some science stuff.

BN: Everyone’s kind of battening down. This idea that not only is the outside world inhospitable, the people that you are going to be trapped inside with are not quite hospitable as well. It feels like for these characters, it’s just as dangerous inside as it is outside.

HE: It’s kind of one of the staples of horror. You know, the call is coming from inside the house.  Being trapped, being snowed in is terrible, but being trapped with the very thing you want to escape is a thousand times worse.

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Hiron Ennes is a writer, musician, and medical student based in the Pacific Northwest. Their areas of interest include infectious disease, pathology, and petting your dog.

Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction.

In Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion, 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 Arctic, then jumps to a paddle-steamer near the Antarctic, then a dirigible over Antarctica, and eventually concludes in the future on a submarine-like explorer under the ice of Europa, the Jupiter moon.

The story is a puzzle, challenging the reader to figure out which if any place and time is real. Adding to the mystery is the reader’s dependence on a first-person narrator Silas Coade, the expedition’s physician. Is the story a book he is writing, a delusion, a series of alternate realities or something else?

Reynolds says his original intention with Eversion was to “recap the entire history of science fiction … We were going to start in a kind of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe mode. And then it was going to go into sort of Jules Verne and then maybe a bit of H.G. Wells, then a sort of early pulp sleuth thing.” That would have been followed by classic space opera and episodes in the styles of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov followed by 1960s and ’70s new wave.

“But once I started writing the book, I realized that there was no way I could bring sufficient variety to the craft to make those episodes work,” he says. “So I cut it down drastically to four or five episodes for the finished product.

From the episode

Rob Wolf: Could you tell us a little bit about Dr. Silas Coade and why did you chose him to be the narrator? I wondered if Silas was based on you because he is a writer like you and is scientifically minded, and you used to work as a science researcher.

Alastair Reynolds: When I start writing a novel, I rarely have a clear sense of the narrative voice that I’m going to use or the primary character. In this case, it’s a first-person viewpoint. We’re essentially in the head of Silas Coade for the entire novel. … You’re asking how much of him is me? Well, I’ve got no medical background, but I find that doctors and medics crop up in my fiction a lot. I really enjoy reading medical memoirs. I think hopefully I’ve absorbed enough of that that I can maybe pull it off to some degree to make the characters seem reasonably convincing. Silas also has West Country roots. That’s the case for me, because, although I’m Welsh and I live in Wales, half my family are from the West Country.

He doesn’t have the airs and graces of all the well-connected, somewhat upper class characters who form some of the other figures on the expedition. And he’s got, I suppose, a bit of an inferiority complex. He thinks that everyone’s looking down on him because he didn’t go to the right medical schools.

I don’t want to draw exact correlations, but I didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge. I had a normal British education. And so I could identify with the way this guy might feel at times—that he doesn’t have the right mannerisms to fit in at the dinner parties that the captain holds. He’s always, always slightly awkward, doesn’t quite know the right thing to say. Once I started writing the book and gravitating to the idea that he was going to be the main character, I really enjoyed doing his bits and particularly his interactions with the other crew members.

Brenda Noiseux: For much of your career you’ve written series of books or multiple books set in particular universes. How big of a shift was it to go from something sprawling like that to the self-contained, first-person view of one character?

Alastair Reynolds: I’ve written quite a few novels, but I’ve also written a lot of short fiction, many, many short stories, and quite a few novellas. When you write a short story or a novella, you can get closer to something that you’re pleased with at the end of it. I’m not saying you achieve perfection, but you can’t get anywhere near perfection in a novel. There’s so many parameters, so many things that can go wrong with a novel, so many plates that you have to keep juggling in the air. It’s a wonder that any novels succeed at all.

But when you when you’re writing something that’s more contained, 20,000 words, you’ve got a shot of getting it polished. This story, it’s about 80,000 to 90,000 words. It’s not a short novel, but by the standards of some of the others books I’ve written—science fiction and fantasy doorstoppers—it’s actually quite concise.

I went into it with the mindset that I was writing a long novella because I knew that was achievable, and I thought I can really home in on the main character and maybe do some of the character work at novel length that I feel I’ve done in shorter works.

Rob Wolf: Should we talk about the title for a moment? I mean, what does eversion mean?

Alastair Reynolds: I was on a trip down the Wikipedia rabbit hole one night, noodling around following links and I found an article about something called sphere eversion. I was kind of aware that there’s some interesting mathematics about things you can do with spheres, but this one caught my eye. The problem is, if you have a sphere, can you turn it inside out? And the answer is yes, you can in a specialized mathematical way that doesn’t map onto what we think of turning things inside out, so it is not the same as turning a football inside out.

And I thought, “Well, it’s kind of interesting.” Computer graphics showed intermediate stages of sphere aversion in the article, and it just sort of struck me that this could be a good hook for a science fiction novel—a kind of governing metaphor where you could have things turning inside out. And at the same time, I was also thinking about this kind of self-contained gothic science fiction novel. And I thought, “Well, I wonder if I can bring the two things together in some way.”

Very early on I told my editor that the book was going to be called Eversion, so it had to be called Eversion and have stuff about sphere eversion in it because I’d already said what the title was. That’s just kind of how I work. It’s not a book about mathematics, but the idea engages one of the characters. He’s very preoccupied with this idea of sphere eversion, and initially it seems to be an abstract preoccupation that does him no good at all because he sort of neglects his own health, but it turns out to be much more critical to the survival of the characters than we initially realize.

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Alastair Reynolds is a former research fellow at the European Space Agency. He’s been writing fiction full-time since 2004 and has 19 novels and more than 70 short stories to show for it. His work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Arthur C Clarke and Sturgeon awards. He’s won the Seiun, Sidewise, European Science Fiction Society and Locus awards, and his stories have been adapted for stage and television.

Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction.

Rob Wolf is a writer and co-host of New Books in Science Fiction.

In a near-future New York City where a minority of the population has lost the need for sleep, Jamie Vega fights to uncover the truth behind his boss’s murder while his own Sleeplessness spirals out of control. 

More than a mystery, through the lens of a world shifted to accommodate those who no longer sleep, Victor Manibo’s debut novel, The Sleepless,  explores the changes to relationships – personal, social, work – and how technology intertwines. 

“We have all of these devices that help us,” says Manibo “but to what extent do they help us? Is this help necessarily and beneficial in the long term or on a grand scale? Aside from that, I also wanted to explore how technology is part of a capitalistic framework. What happens when it’s controlled by a corporate interest? And what happens when it’s controlled specifically by individuals who do not have the common good in mind?”

From the episode

Brenda Noiseux:  I’ve been thinking about this book, is it a thriller? Is it a mystery?

Victor Manibo: I really wanted to have both the genres kind of strongly represented in this book. I grew up reading a lot of mysteries and I love the puzzle aspect of the mystery. But I also like the kind of more exciting, faster paced action of a thriller, and especially like a lot of sci-fi movies that I grew up watching and books that I grew up reading did have that kind of quicker pace. 

BN: The idea of The Sleepless almost felt like a different take on immortality, not in the way that we tend to think about it, like vampires and living forever.

VM: It’s kind of a way to grasp at immortality. It’s a way of staving off death for a little bit longer. When you’re sleepless, you do get extra time during, either physical or even probably a mental peak of your life. You probably aren’t living until you’re 150 or 200, but you effectively have a third of your life extended.

BN: There was a moment where I’m like, “Oh, we’re going full unreliable narrator”, but then I turn the page and you’ve addressed it head on.

VM: I love stories with unreliable narrators, but it’s also something that I personally have consumed a lot of, and so I know a lot of readers have also consumed stories and mysteries, where you can never quite trust your narrator. Oh, are they actually the killer? Who knows? But that’s something that I think a lot of people have read. And I’m like, okay, well, I could go that way, but also I could just deal with this head on and try something else. 

BN: I love the cover art. It’s striking. It was done by Dana Li and it was one of the reasons I was drawn to the book.

VM: Dana Li did an excellent job. And you know, you can’t see it right now, but I have a neon sign inspired by this book cover that are just like the eyes. I had that custom made because I’m just so in love with this cover.

BN: Did you have any sleepless nights while you were doing this thought experiment? Was it keeping you awake at night that you had to get it out of your brain? 

VM: No, but the funny thing is, the sleepless nights came after I wrote the book, when, you know, I had to revise it.

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Victor Manibo is a speculative fiction writer living in New York City, and his writing is influenced by his experiences as an immigration and civil rights lawyer. As a queer immigrant and a person of color, he also writes about the lives of people with these identities.

Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction.