New Books in Science Fiction
Bestselling and award-winning science fiction authors talk about their new books and much more in candid conversations with host Rob Wolf. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Episodes
Superhero violence and graphic action sequences are prevalent on the screen and on the page, but this book takes an alternative route with practical guidance, frameworks, and tools for incorporating the principles of peacebuilding and nonviolence into compelling fiction. By mapping a path less travelled but just as vital in divisive times, in n A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism (Bloomsbury, 2025) Dr. Ga...
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June 21, 2025 • 37 mins
NBN host Hollay Ghadery interviews Christy Climenhage, the author of the highly-anticipated science fiction thriller, The Midnight Project (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) Julie E. Czerneda, author of To Each This World, calls this novel “an absolute triumph.”
About The Midnight Project:
In this near-future science fiction thriller, Christy Climenhage has created a frighteningly real world on the verge of collapse. As disaster strikes, the...
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June 7, 2025 • 36 mins
In this NBN episode, Hollay Ghadery speaks with Lindsay Wong about her short story collection, Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality (Penguin, 2023).
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BC AND YUKON JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKESFrom the bestselling, Canada Reads-shortlisted author of The Woo-Woo comes a wild, darkly hilarious, and poignant collection of immigrant horror stories. They’ll haunt and consume you—in strange and unsettl...
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May 18, 2025 • 58 mins
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with the conclusion to the series. We break down, analyze, and explain the political themes in these finale episodes, focusing on freedom, order and their interconnectedness in both the rebellion and the Empire. We explore the extent to which farce is an operative mode of storytelling in this arc. And we consider Cassian's statement that "nothing is ending," fin...
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May 11, 2025 • 70 mins
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 7-9.
We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the question of when in a rebellion must you break cover and insist - publicly - on the truth. We see a second major theme of this arc as discipline. The rebellion is moving from a para-military to a military posture, and requires increasing discipline from its members as it does so. F...
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May 3, 2025 • 55 mins
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 4-6. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the mirrored political challenges faced by figures from the Empire and the Rebellion. We see a big theme of these episodes as “too much information,” as both sides struggle to distinguish friend from foe, signal from noise, the authentic from the inauthentic. We discuss classic politica...
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April 26, 2025 • 51 mins
It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we react to Andor Season 2, episodes 1-3. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the motives and aims of the rebellion and the Empire. Both sides have major coordination problems in these episodes, although the causes are very different. We explain and analyze the recurrent problems of authoritarian control and rebellion against it, and the way Andor comments upon them. We see a ...
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April 24, 2025 • 50 mins
In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.
...
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February 4, 2025 • 50 mins
You Must Take Part In Revolution is a mind-bending graphic novel by award-winning journalist Melissa Chan and acclaimed dissident artist Badiucao. A near-future dystopia in the vein of George Orwell's Animal's Farm, the book explores technology, authoritarian government, and the lengths to which one will go in the fight for freedom. Three idealistic young people, forever changed by the real-life protests in Hong Kong in 2019, devel...
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January 19, 2025 • 39 mins
Ben Berman Ghan is the author of the bestselling novel, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024).
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is a gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction. With elements of science fiction and horror dropped in amongst stunning literary prose, the debut novel spans centuries, covering humanity’s colonization of the moon, a war with alien beings, AI minds governing Canada, and a gia...
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December 31, 2024 • 51 mins
After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate T...
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December 24, 2024 • 24 mins
Suzy Krause’s latest speculative fiction novel, I Think We’ve Been Here Before (Radiant Press, 2024) is a compulsively readable and cosy story.
Marlen and Hilda Jorgensen’s family has received two significant pieces of news: one, Marlen has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Two, a cosmic blast is set to render humanity extinct within a matter of months. It seems the coming Christmas on their Saskatchewan farm will be their la...
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December 23, 2024 • 46 mins
With this dry observance Peter Darbyshire introduces us to Cross, a man who has lived thousands of years, though he’d prefer not to have, and who is now hunting angels in a Barcelona filled with tourists, phone cameras and deep mystery.
The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (Poplar Press, 2024) is a layered supernatural thriller, filled with history, magic and beloved characters. When an angel promises to deliver Judas, a forgotten god of a forg...
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December 21, 2024 • 32 mins
Born nameless, in a rigid, autocratic society that has relegated all women to non-person status — Unmales — two women fight against their invisibility in Autokrator (Cormorant Books, 2024), the gripping saga by Canadian author and screenwriter Emily Weedon.
The disappearance of yet another Domestic means Cera must take on extra duties and tend the rooms of The Cratorling, the young successor to the autocracy. Face-to-face with him...
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November 22, 2024 • 47 mins
Fascists such as Richard Spencer interpret science fiction films and literature as saying only white men have the imagination required to invent a high-tech future. Other white nationalists envision racist utopias filled with Aryan supermen and all-white space colonies. Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) traces these ideas through the entangled histories of science fiction...
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November 12, 2024 • 29 mins
Today I talked to Benjamin Resnick about his novel Next Stop (Simon and Schuster, 2024)
A hole opens in the universe and suddenly consumes a building, then a neighborhood, and then the entire country of Israel. Conspiracies and antisemitic paranoia simmer, violence erupts, and life for Jews around the globe becomes even more hate filled. But Ethan and Ella, both Jewish, meet and fall in love in an unnamed American city. Their relat...
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October 20, 2024 • 57 mins
It's been almost five years since a wrathful extraterrestrial called Rex perpetrated a mass shooting that caused hundreds of millions of people to take their own lives. The world has mourned its losses and moved on, trying to adhere to The Pledge to save themselves from more violence. But when a solar storm conceals the dangerous activities being done at the hotel, Tia must figure out who these strangers are and what they are doing...
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September 23, 2024 • 40 mins
When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man's-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories (MIT Pre...
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September 20, 2024 • 59 mins
A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by trans...
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September 16, 2024 • 60 mins
n this special Star Trek Day episode on the New Books Network, hosted by Dessy Vassileva from Vernon Press, we celebrate over 55 years of Star Trek with a deep dive into the book Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier (Vernon Press, 2023). Co-editors Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis join the discussion to explore how Star Trek has shaped science fiction and contributed to broader academic and cultural conversations around sp...
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