A Meal of Thorns

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

We’re leaving speculative genres for just a moment! Author Max Gladstone joins to discuss style & structure in Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled classic The Big Sleep, a work that’s been massively influential across SFF literature, games, & film.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Max Gladstone

Title: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Additional music from David Hilowitz’s “Future Cities”, CC BY-NC 4.0

And a couple of seconds from the end of The Mountain Goats’ “Cadaver Sniffing Dog”

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Nominate for the Hugos!

Nominate for the Le Guin Prize!

Support Locus Magazine’s Fundraiser!

ARB Kickstarter coming soon!

Stranger Things

Metro City by Kurt Busiec et al.

Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky

Kieron Gillan

Balsam Karam's Event Horizon

John Darnielle's This Year

Song Exploder episode on the Mountain Goats song “Cadaver Sniffing Dog”

'Pataphysics

Waigong & neigong

Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”

Dorothy Parker

William Gibson

L.A. Confidential, dir. Curtis Hanson

Tracer Bullet in Bill Waterson’s Calvin & Hobbes

Snoopy in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts

Dashiel Hammett

Haruki Murakami'sHard-Boiled Wonderland & The End of the World

Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light & The Dead Man's Brother

The Raymond Chandler Papers, edited by Tom Hiney & Frank McShane

James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity

Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder”

Max Payne, directed by Petri Järvilehto & written by Sam Lake

Albert Camus & Jean-Paul Sartre

Robert A. Heinlein

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun

Hammet's The Maltese Falcon

Chandler’s The Long Goodbye

Fix-ups & “cannibal novels”

William Faulkner & Leigh Bracket

To Have and To Have Not, directed by Howard Hawks

Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall

Chandler’s The High Window

Rex Stour's Nero Wolfe stories, such as Black Orchids

“The CSI effect”

Jeffrey Rowland's “Science Cop” bit in Wigu

David Lynch

Paul Aster

Peter Brooks' Reading for the Plot

Dead Hand Rule, the latest Craft novel (one more to come!)

Max's website & newsletter

In this science fiction novel, translated from the French, dreamers “dive” into their own subconscious and return with mysterious & valuable objects. Translator, author, & scholar Alexander Dickow joins to discuss Francophone SF, weird fiction, and artistic allegories & analogies.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Alexander Dickow

Title: The Deep-Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo, translated by Edward Gauvin

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Nominate for the Hugos (if you’re eligible to)

Nominate for the Le Guin prize (open to all!)

The Translated Hugo Initiative

Alexander’s Strange Horizons article on Francophone SF

China Miéville

Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

Poets Skip Fox & Ian Seeds

Emil Petaja’s The Nets of Space

Philippe Curval

Kilgore Trout

Alfred Jarry & ‘Pataphysics

Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov

Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan

Philip K. Dick

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?/Bladerunner

PKD’s The Galactic Pot Healer, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Ubik

Nathalie Sarraute’s work on Proust (possibly in The Age of Suspicion)

Tolkien's “Leaf By Niggle”

Harrison's Clomping Foot of Nerdism

C.J. Cherryh's Wave Without A Shore

Samuel Richardson

Walter Scott

Keats’ letter to Woodhouse: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence.”

PKD’s A Scanner Darkly

“Smellevision replaces television”

Zachary Gillan’s work on the "Weird Art Story"

Richard Gavin

Alexander’s “The Weird and the Fantastic: Genre in Theory and Genre as History”

Laurent Genefort

Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author

Honoré de Balzac

Samatar's Olondriannovels

Ray Bradbury's "The Jar"

Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun

"Anti-fantasy"

Christopher Nolan's Inception

JJ Abram's “Mystery Box” (blech boo hiss)

Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart

Alexander's Linktree

Alain Damasio’s The Horde of the Counterwind

Reviewer and historian Liz Bourke joins to discuss religion, historical overlaps, and examinations of gender in Paladin of Souls and fantasy more generally.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Liz Bourke

Title: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Blood Tide by Sophie Burnham

Jen Lyons' Green and Deadly Things

Hiron Ennes’ The Works of Vermin

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

Bret Devereaux’s series on military-historical realism in Tolkien; see for instance “The Siege of Gondor Part IV”

McMaster’s Curse of Chalion, Penric & Desdemona series, Vorkosigan series

Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love

Bioware's Dragon Age games

Cult of Asclepius

Tolkien's idea of the “eucatastrophe”

M. Night Shyamalan

Mythopoeia

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories

Liz's bluesky & website

Greg Egan’s work exemplifies a certain kind of “hard” science fiction: not that it’s obsessed with big manly space battles, but rather that it’s using science to really dig into some complicated subjects. Eden Kupermintz, of Death // Sentence and many other cool projects, joins to discuss the scope and the scale, philosophy and physics in Diaspora.

 

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

 

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Eden Kupermintz

Title: Diaspora by Greg Egan

Host: Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Additional music:

"Equatorial Complex" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

"Fluidscape" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

The Translated Hugo Initiative

Brian Catling's Earwig

Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy

Jeff VanderMeer's The Strange Bird

Jeremy P. Bushnell's Relentless Melt

Severian (from Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun)

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

"Every text is ergodic if you want it to be."

Pink Floyd's Stairway to Heaven

Heavy Blog is Heavy

Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora, translated by Rahul Bery

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieve, translated by Rahul Bery

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Enrigue in discussion with Maia Gil’Adí (friend of the pod) on Novel Dialogue

Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation & Authority (and the Meal of Thorns episode)

Dan Simmons’ Hyperion

Ursula Le Guin's Ekumen (in the Hainish books)

Ben Berman Ghan’s The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits & Eden's review

Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Starmaker

Greg Egan's Scale

Backlisted episode on Last and First Men

David Hume

leptons & femtoseconds

Gilles Deleuze & Jacques Derrida

Immanuel Kant & correlationism

Egan's Perihelion Summer

Socrates & Plato & the polis

solipsism

Edwin A. Abbot's Flatland

Zelazny, Le Guin, Dick, Asimov

Peter Watts' Blindsight

Becky Chambers' To Be Taught If Fortunate

Egan's Morphotropic

Larry Niven (e.g., Ringworld)

"I know kung fu" scene in The Matrix

Pragmatism, coherence, William James

The Best of Greg Egan

Permutation City

Greg Daniel’s Upload series

The Orthogonal Rocket trilogy

Zendegi

Karen Burnham's Modern Masters of SF book on Egan

MMSF on Ballard, Bester

Frederick Pohl's Gateway

Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero

Wells, Camille Flammarion, Flash Gordon, Star Trek & Star Wars

M. John Harrison’s The Centauri Device

Gareth Watkin's essay on AI & fascism

John M. Ford's Web of Angels on Death // Sentence

GregEgan.net