Kobo in Conversation

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist and the author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. In that book she not only explains in layperson's terms the phenomena she observes as a scientist, but also how she observes science as a social and fundamentally human activity, with all the messiness that entails. We spoke with her about many things, including her East LA upbringing, and how she sees herself and people like her among the generations of humans watching the stars.

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Janelle Shane writes the blog AI Weirdness, where she delights readers with broken outcomes of the latest developments in artificial intelligence, ranging from computer-generated recipes like horseradish brownies, to pickup lines like, "You look like a thing, and I love you." She's also the author of the book, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place. We spoke with her about the uses and abuses of artificial intelligence, and we learned why it's unlikely anybody's going to read a wholly AI-written novel anytime soon.

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Edward Rutherfurd is the author of epic works of historical fiction including London, Russka, The Dublin Saga, and the new novel, China. We spoke with him about how he finds the right scale for his enormous books and when one of the many projects he has simmering is ready to be fleshed out into a manuscript of many hundreds of pages. And he shared with us his perspective on how he confronts the challenge of getting inside the minds of characters who would have lived centuries ago and half a world away.

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In this special episode of Kobo In Conversation Michael spoke with Shari Lapena, the Canadian queen of domestic suspense, as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors with an audience watching online and asking questions.

Listen to hear about Lapena's award-nominated false start as a novelist, where she got the idea for her new book Not A Happy Family, and why--unlike other mystery writers--she doesn't work with a "murder wall."

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We're back with a new season of Kobo in Conversation! This week, Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus series of Scottish crime novels, joins us to talk about his new novel The Dark Remains, which he wrote with assistance from, and in tribute to his literary hero, the late William McIlvanney. He spoke about how life under covid lockdown unlocked a wave of writing productivity, and which books helped him get his reading mojo back.

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Phenderson Djèlí Clark's books take readers into places in history that feel familiar, but have spun off of the timeline we exist on. In Ring Shout we meet a militia fighting in Georgia against the Ku Klux Klan, which has invited actual demons into its hooded ranks with the help of the magical cinema of D. W. Griffith. But he's also written about a steampunk version of early 20th century Cairo in the Dead Djinn Universe and an alternate history of New Orleans during the US Civil War in The Black God's Drums. We spoke with him about writing (and overwriting), his mythologically-rich upbringing, and how he (an academic historian in his day job) picks points in history to tweak in his novels and novellas.

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As we draw Season 4 of Kobo in Conversation to a close, we bring you a conversation with theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack on a wholly different kind of ending. Listeners may recall host Michael Tamblyn's praise for The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) in our year-end Staff Picks episode, where he found that during 2020, it helped to have a sense of time and space and the forces acting on every particle throughout the universe. Michael spoke with Katie about the 5 theoretical ways the universe will end, and we learned why for her the study of astrophysics is preferably a "social" science.

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Torrey Peters' debut novel Detransition, Baby wasn't supposed to be a novel. She'd self-published a pair of novellas and was planning on doing the same for this book -- until it outgrew her plans for it. She spoke with us about her writing career, how she navigates expectations of representation, and why Detransition, Baby is perfectly suited to a mainstream publisher who doesn't specialize in reaching transgender readers. Plus, she told us about the surprising direction she's going in with her next novel.

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Paleontologist Steve Brusatte joined us to talk about his new book for young readers, The Age of Dinosaurs as well as his 2018 book for adults, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. We learned about his passion for giving readers a sense of dinosaurs as living, breathing animals, and what his hopes are for the future of paleontology.

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Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread and the playful new novel Peaces, spoke with us about the importance to her writing process of taking long book-free breaks, and how serving on juries for literary prizes has made her certain that she'll never win a major award.

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