Novel Dialogue

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.

All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020), his vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. In only five years, it may have become the most influential work of climate fiction ever—perhaps right up there with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its thoroughly shocking ability to jump into the political fray.

Flanked by Novel Dialogue’s John Plotz, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asks him to reflect on the book’s impact. He brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civilization is very bad. And ignoring it…is not going to work.”

Mentioned in the Episode:

--Pact for the Future

--COP 26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference)

--COP 30 (where KSR will be a UN rep….)

--Planetary boundaries J. Rockstrom (et. al.)

--Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

--Paris Agreement

--Don’t Look Up

--Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

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What work can genre do today? And can the genre system become more than a method of reductive containment and market segmentation—can it be a generative source of imaginative chaos? Few are as qualified to address these questions as Lauren Beukes, whose simultaneous embrace of genres from science fiction to crime to horror and refusal to abide within their borders—what she calls her “Big Fuck You Energy”—has rendered her, by her own account, “basically un-shelve-able.” Beukes is joined by crime fiction scholar (and novelist) Andrew Pepper of Queen’s University Belfast for a conversation that dances across her oeuvre’s many genres. They delve into how Beukes first encountered genre through the allegories that writers used to navigate the apartheid state of South Africa; how Beukes’ experiences of femicidal violence and police apathy inspired her work in genre-bent crime (“At least in novels I get to have justice,” she tells us); the inflection of dystopia from different global perspectives; and the role of speculative fiction in helping clarify political enemies in an age of obfuscation. Pepper and Beukes also think about genre in more practical terms, from the logistics of keeping track of plotlines when crafting time travel or multiverse novels to what it means to be a “high concept” author in a market designed for distracted audiences.

Mentioned in this Episode

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It’s a bit surprising to hear a writer known for building worlds that incorporate deep historical research and elaborate technological details extol the virtues of play, but Ken Liu tells critic Rose Casey and host Sarah Wasserman that if “your idea of heaven doesn’t include play, then I’m not sure it’s a heaven people want to go to.” It turns out that Ken—acclaimed translator and author of the “silkpunk” epic fantasy series Dandelion Dynasty and the award-winning short story collection The Paper Menagerie—is deeply serious about play. Speaking about play as the key to technological progress, Ken and Rose discuss the importance of whimsy and the inextricable relationship between imagination and usefulness. For Ken, whose Dandelion Dynasty makes heroes of engineers instead of wizards or knights, precise machinery and innovative gadgets are born, like novels, of imagination. Ken himself might be best described as a meticulous, dedicated tinkerer—a writer playing with the materials and stories of the past to help us encounter new worlds in the present. So even if trying to explain his craft is “like asking fish how they swim,” Ken jumps in and discusses how he writes at such different lengths (hint: the longer the book, the more elephantine) and what he makes of different genre labels, from fantasy to historical fiction. We also learn why Ken is a fan of Brat Summer and still thinking about the Roman Empire.

Mentioned in this episode:

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We kick off Season 9: TECH by talking with our very own Aarthi Vadde, the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Hosts and co-producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Aarthi about the role of the novel in relation to the mass writing platforms that dominate our digital lives. Aarthi is at work on a book called We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, and she explains how the novel can mark the invisible infrastructures of the internet, defamiliarize the “computational surround” of everyday life, and give us new angles on writing with and against bots. Join us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 9 of Novel Dialogue and to find out what Aarthi's students say when asked: "What would you never automate even if you could?"

Mentions

-Jennifer Egan: “Black Box”

-Teju Cole: Small Fates, Tremor

-Lauren Oyler: Fake Accounts

-Stewart Home

-Tom McCarthy: Satin Island

-Yxta Maya Murray: Art Is Everything

-Fred Benenson

-Xu Bing: Book from the Ground

-Rachel Cusk: Transit

Naomi Alderman

-R.F. Kuang: Yellowface

-Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You

-Sheila Heti, “According to Alice”

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Eighteenth century prison break artist and folk hero Jack Sheppard is among history’s most frequently adapted rogues: his exploits have inspired Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Bertolt Brecht, and most recently, Jordy Rosenberg, whose first novel, Confessions of the Fox (2018), rewrites Sheppard as a trans man and Sheppard’s partner Bess as a South Asian lascar and part of the resistance movement in the Fens. Rosenberg embeds the manuscript tracing their love story within a satirical frame narrative of a professor whose discovery of it gets him caught up in an absurd and increasingly alarming tussle with neoliberal academic bureaucracy and corporate malfeasance. Jordy is joined here by Annie McClanahan, a scholar of contemporary literature and culture who describes herself as an unruly interloper in the 18th century. 

Like Jordy’s novel, their conversation limns the 18th and 21st centuries, taking up 18th century historical concerns and the messy early history of the novel alongside other textual and vernacular forms, but also inviting us to rethink resistance and utopian possibility today through the lens of this earlier moment. Jordy and Annie leapfrog across centuries, reading the 17th century ballad “The Powtes Complaint” in relation to extractivism and environmental justice, theorizing the “riotous, anarchic, queer language of the dispossessed” that characterizes Confessions of the Fox as a kind of historically informed cognitive estrangement for the present, and considering the work theory does (and does not) do in literary works and in academic institutions.

Mentioned in this Episode

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During a desert thunderstorm outside Tucson, Lydia Millet joined the Novel Dialogue conversation with hosts John Plotz and Emily Hyde, with Emily playing the role of critic. Lydia—author more than a dozen novels and story collections and recently the nonfictional We Loved it All (Norton, 2024)—also works at the Center for Biological Diversity. Wild creatures gambol, flap, swim, and crawl their way through her writing and her conversation: we begin in the Garden of Eden but quickly learn that for Lydia human exceptionalism is the original sin, one that continues to bedevil us in “the nuclear era” (or did she say error?). As thunder cracks overhead, she muses on salvation in an exhausted world and the busy lives of Gambel’s Quail. In her recent novels, Lydia has worked to balance the intensely personal with our more communal aspirations: without gossip, she wonders, how do you avoid polemic and the maudlin? Emily praises Lydia’s humor and asks us to consider how a joke—the earnest set-up followed by a sudden deflation—can reconcile our fears and hopes for the future, the daily here-and-now with the magnificent unknowability of the world. Is it humor, comedy, satire, wit? Lydia is “just trying make myself laugh.” She worries, in her life as well as in her writing, about the BS impulse to pretend everything’s ok inside “this emergency, this critical life support dilemma.” We also learn that Lydia will never write historical fiction, despite having a tantalizing family connection to Mark Twain.

Mentions:

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Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the U.S. army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which was a finalist for The National Book Award. Jamil joins Northwestern prof. Kalyan Nadiminti and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about narrative form and the cycles of war.

We begin by discussing the second person, a technique Jamil uses throughout Hajji Hotak. He describes it as the most “dangerous perspective” for a fiction writer to take because it brings readers to the edge of the immersive world fiction is supposed to create. The second person in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, from which Jamil reads, forces readers to grapple with our own complicity in the surveillance of Afghan families in the United States and to consider the paradoxical affection that develops between people on opposing sides of war. From there, Jamil, Kalyan, and Aarthi discuss the relationship between video games as mass media and the novel as literary form. Jamil is a huge fan of Final Fantasy 7 (who isn’t?) and talks about how games like Call of Duty (a game he played more ambivalently) perform a recruitment function for the U.S. army. He rewrites that vision of war in more complex terms in his own story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain." Kalyan reflects on how the category of the post-9/11 writer intersects with the War on Terror, and the three of us consider the symbolic function of 9/11 in contemporary fiction written from inside and outside the United States.

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What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War.

Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann’s physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos.

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An unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward failure and the limitations of language that Akbar discusses with critic Pardis Dabashi. In their conversation, Kaveh considers writing both as an escape from the confines of the self and as a vehicle for expressing its contradictions. Together they explore which forms might best capture the ambivalence and polyphony of the human mind, the contours of Iranian American identity, and the spiritual beauty of everyday existence. Whether discussing neurolinguistics or the affordances of poetry, Kaveh contemplates the limits of language: how can we write what we think, when we struggle to know what—or how—we think? This conversation goes deep into the psyche in order to reach far beyond it. Even Kaveh’s deeply personal response to the signature question demonstrates that the places farthest away from us may also be found within.

Mentioned in this episode

By Kaveh Akbar:

Also mentioned:

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What does it mean for a novel to think globally? And can a global novel concerned with the macro movements of capital and labor still exist in the form of a bildungsroman? This conversation between Lydia Kiesling and Megan Ward takes up questions of form and political consciousness in the novel, globality and rootedness, capitalism and the yearning for things, optimization and wellness culture, and so much more. Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree. Her second novel, Mobility, is the first book in a new imprint with Crooked Media. Lydia and Megan discuss seeing the world from a foreign service perspective, the damage wrought by cultures of individuality, and why more novels aren’t set in Azerbaijan. Lydia talks about how the close reading skills that she gained from an English major provide a way reading the world that is underappreciated by our contemporary culture of utilitarianism. From wet bun hair styles to how we want novels to speak about progressive politics, this wide-ranging conversation wraps up with Lydia’s excellent answer to Season 8’s signature question.

Mentions:

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