A Meal of Thorns

Science fiction readers love a mechanism, they love a bit of world-building and mystery-solving. Premee Mohamed joins us to discuss Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a book that asks: what if a science fiction book intentionally avoided all of that?

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Premee Mohamed

Title: The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Mercutio by Kate Heartfield

Pretenders to the Throne of God by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Orbit 10 anthology edited by Damon Knight

William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say” and its many responses

Premee’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight

Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon

Heart of Darkness by Josef Conrad

The Vorrh by B. Catling

The face dancers from Frank Herbert’s Dune series

Mystique and the Kree from the Marvel/X-Men comics

Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

Premee’s The Butcher of the Forest & Wickhills

"sentients" & "sapients"

“The Great Chain of Being”

Star Wars series The Bad Batch and The Clone Wars

Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead

Octavia Butler's Dawn

Tolkien's On Fairy Stories

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? & Ridley Scott's Bladerunner

Premee’s The Siege of Burning Grass

Hilary Putnam's “Twin Earth”

Premee's Patreon, Website, Bluesky

Wickhills & From the Library of Jurgen Leitner

The Carl Brandon Society

A rain of corpses is falling from the sky, insectoid femme fatales are setting their compound eyes on our tender thoraxes, and our cattle drive across an expanse of nanotech goo is starting to go off the rails. So we ask ourselves: do we still have to go to work tomorrow? Critic, author, & podcaster Gareth Watkins joins to discuss Dempow Torishima’s delightfully strange Sisyphean.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Gareth Watkins

Title: Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima, translated by Daniel Huddleston

Host: Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Death // Sentence

Muskism by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff

Peter Thiel

One Piece by Eiichiro Oda

Slavoj Žižek

René Girard

Carl Schmitt

Thiel/Douthat NYT interview

Jeff VanderMeer

Haikosoru

Viz Comics

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

M. John Harrison’s essay on worldbuilding

Marmite/Vegemite

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel

"Professor Jiang"

Isaac Asimov's Foundation

New Chronology

Tartarianism

Franz Kafka & Philip K. Dick

A Scanner Darkly

H.R. Giger

Phil Tippet’s Mad God

Kameron Hurley's The Stars are Legion

Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus

Manuela Draeger's Kree

Mike Judge’s Office Space

David Cronenberg

Raymond Chandler

Antonio Gramsci

Nick Land

Friedrich Nietzsche's eternal recurrence

Yoss's Planet for Rent

Deleuze & Guitarri

The Sex Pistols & Avril Lavigne

H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu"

Ayn Rand

Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts

Torishima's Kanadete no Nufuretsun

Gareth's bluesky

Just Plain Evil: Cruelty, Extinction, and the Authoritarian Mind

Gareth's appearances on Blood Work

Stop explaining and start exploring: critic & reviewer Molly Templeton walks us through this gem of 1980s mass market fantasy, with many asides and theories on shifting patterns of publishing and reading patterns. Plus, we spill the beans on the most fun book club, also known as the most fun cult.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Molly Templeton

Title: Moongather by Jo Clayton

Host: Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

ARB’s Fundraiser! Donations & shares greatly appreciated!

Kurt Vonnegut's asterisk

John Darnielle's This Year

"Cold Milk Bottle"

"First Few Desperate Hours"

Claire North's Slow Gods

Hebe Stanton’s review at ARB

Molly’s discussion of Slow Gods and being stuck on a book

Gary Wolfe & Jonathan Strahan's Coode Street Podcast

Arkady Martine & Ann Leckie

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Violet Allen's Prism, Plastic, Void

Little Puss Press

Casey Plett

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose The Time War

Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall

A.V. Marraccini’s We The Parasites

Clayton’s Diadem from the Stars

Brandon Sanderson

Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea

Forgotten Realms

J.R.R. Tolkien's “On Fairy Stories” & Lord of the Rings

Ged & the otak from Earthsea

"Fridging" & "Bury Your Gays"

The Arrowverse TV shows

Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Film

"Explaining vs Exploring"

Bora Chung's Midnight Timetable

The Toyota Tercel

The soot-sprites from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away

C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner

Bethany Jacobs’ This Brutal Moon, conclusion to The Kindom Trilogy

Jacobs’ website

Philip Pullman's The Rose Field

The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey

David Eddings’ The Belgariad

Parallel Worlds Bookshop

Cherryh's Rusalka & The Paladin

The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation & Prize

Molly's writing at Reactor & Bluesky & Website

The pleasures and perils of nostalgia & reference, the importance of identifying real play versus gamified labor, and whether the internet used to be fun: Matthew Leggat of the Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast joins to discuss Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Matthew Leggatt

Title: Ready Player One by Ernie Cline

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

ARB’s Fundraiser!!!

Matthew’s Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror, Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, and Wastelands and Wonderlands

The Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Chicano Frankenstein by Daniel A. Olivas

U&DF episode with Olivas

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash & Reamde

William Gibson’s Neuromancer

K.A. Teryna’s Black Hole Heart translated by Alex Shvartsman

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya’s Chain Gang All-Stars

Was It Yesterday: Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television edited by Matthew

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code

Gamergate

“Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel, and the Geeky ‘Canon’ of White Masculinity” by Megan Amber Condis

Captain Crunch: phreaker John Draper

Kyle Chayka’s "Why the internet isn't fun anymore"

William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”

Ling Ma's Severance

Helen MacDonald & Syn Blaché’s Prophet

MacDonald’s H is for Hawk

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris

Alice Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture

The television series Stranger Things

Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life

Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (based on Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!) & Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon

B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two

Voight-Kampf Test from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner / Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The "lusory attitude" from Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia

Ernst Callenbach's Ecotopia

Philip Nel’s “I Love the ‘80s: Dystopia, Nostalgia, and Ready Player One”

Michael Jackson

372 Pages We'll Never Get Back

(That's Mike Nelson of MST3K Fame)

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Jordan Carroll's Speculative Whiteness

Paul Hardisty'sForcing trilogy

A nested novel that very pointedly bridges the litfic/specfic divide, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas takes some big swings at tricky topics. Abigail Nussbaum returns to the podcast with some thoughts on how the novel has aged, and how it’s still relevant to genre thinking today.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Abigail Nussbaum

Title: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

ARB’s Fundraiser!!!

Track Changes

Aliya Whiteley’s The Misheard World & Abigail’s review

Nina Allen

Alexis Hall's Hell's Heart

Olivia Waite

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick

Lincoln Michel's Metallic Realms

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire

Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees

Readerville forum & Salon Magazine's “The Well”

The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan

Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape & Motherless Brooklyn

Kate Atkinson's Case Histories

Our episode on The Historian

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

New Wave, Cyberpunk, Mundane SF, The New Weird

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

The “New Adult” category of books

Taylor Jenkins Reed

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The Marvel Cinematic Universe

Aragorn’s Tax Policy

Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending

Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

Jean Baudrillard

William Gibson

The Stanford marshmallow experiment

The Chatham Islands, Moriori & Māori peoples

Charlie Jane Anders’ piece on Cloud Atlas

The Velvet Underground joke (not many people listened, but everybody who did started a band)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Niall Harrison’s “In Search of Green Overshoots”

The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

Abigail's Blog & Bluesky

Tolkien Series: Roseanna Pendlebury & Ed Morland’s, Ranged Touch’s Shelved by Genre, Nick Hubble, Jared Pechaček, Weird Studies