The Infinite Library

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, Book-Heads! This week John and Ben are joined deep in the stacks by Eden of Death//Sentence, Heavy Blog is Heavy, and AnarchySF to discuss the "Velvet Underground of 80s Fantasy Novels": "The Dragon Waiting" by John M. Ford. Topics of conversation include the wild and wooly figure of John M. Ford himself, the curious nature of the Alternate History genre, and what can happen when a work of fantasy tries to do "too much". Eden is also kind enough to provide a true smorgasbord of recommendations for the starving Infinite Library public.

Semper Books! We'll see you next year!

This week, the Book Boys are diving into the swamp and getting way out of their depth with Qiu Miaojin’s “Notes of a Crocodile”. Despite very much not being Taiwanese lesbians, the Infinite Library is discussing one of the seminal works of Taiwanese lesbian fiction. Come for the riveting conversation on 90s Taiwan and the history of homosexuality in the Sinosphere, stay to hear John butcher the pronunciation of something in Mandarin.

Put on your Pomas and get ready to consult the Cone of Fate, because this week John and Ben are reading "Masters of Atlantis" by Charlie Portis. The Book Boys talk about cults, the unceasing march of time, and John's theory of the "Boomer Novel".

In aerodynamics, a “slipstream” is the region behind a moving object in which a wake of fluid (typically air or water) is moving at velocities comparable to that of the moving object, such as the the wake behind a speeding boat or jet plane. Most do not know though, that the term has another use: a genre of literature originally described by science fiction author Bruce Sterling in his 1989 essay of the same name. Sterling’s own description of slipstream as a genre is slippery at best, but it can be summarized as a movement growing out of both science fiction and literary fiction, blending the qualities of both into a stranger amalgamation, unfamiliar to both of its parents. For Sterling, slipstream was the wake behind the accelerating body of mainstream literature at the turn of the millenium, where writers sought to describe the ever stranger conditions of modern existence by transcending the constraints of genre that commercial publishing demands they fit into.

At least, that’s what Sterling thought. The fact of the matter is that “slipstream” has never exactly caught on as a term and not many of authors have self-conciously associated themselves with it. Despite that fact, the idea of “slipstream” has remained in the substrata of literary criticism: a genre whose name hardly describes what it is and who has no conscious acolytes. 

2006’s “Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology” sought to bring the genre into wider circulation, providing a smorgasboard of authors (including luminaries like Kelly Link, Ted Chiang, and Michael Chabon) who the editors felt emodied in their words, “21st Century Schizoid Art”. Ben and I sat down to talk about the anthology, the stories therein, the concept of “slipstream” and the strange place the whole concept of genre finds itself in in 2023. 

We hope you enjoy the conversation.

John and Ben knew that Halloween can be a dangerous time in the Infinite Library, what with all the ghosts and goblins around, so they knew they were going to need a bit of extra support for this very spooky episode. Luckily, Dylan and Robb from Hot for Creature were sucked into the Library when Robb's Blu-Ray collection officially got "out of hand" so the Frightening Foursome was able to sit down and talk about Koji Suzuki's classic horror novel "Ring" as well as the famous 1998 film adaptation directed by Hideo Nakata. That's right folks, it's a crossover episode.

TRIGGER WARNING: Racially charged language (Mediterranean)

As a little pre-Halloween treat, John decided to sit down and do a narration of one of their favorite Lovecraft stories: Pickman's Model.

This is our team's first time putting something like this together, so please forgive the minor audio issues. Enjoy!

Ghoul evening, ladies & gentle-creeps. John & Ben welcome you to another foray into the endless stacks of the Infinite Library, but this time...it's spooky.

For our first Halloween themed episode of October 2023, we're descending into the ghost-haunted crypts of the Library to discuss the first ever Gothic novel: "The Castle of Otranto". We start off the episode with a discussion of what this thing called "The Gothic" even is. Then Ben, provides some historical context on the book and the life and times of its fancy-lad author, Horace Walpole.

With the formalities out of the way, we then dig into the book itself, which dares to ask the most horrifying question of all: What if your father-in-law tried to start an age gap relationship with you? We close off with John & Ben departing from the world of books for a quick jaunt to the glitzy & glamour of Hollywood.

We hope you enjoy!

John & Ben welcome you to the Infinite Library, a world where books are infinite, but we are not. We start off with a little table talk about the podcast and what we're doing here is. With the boring stuff out of the way, we dig into our first topic: "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco: a novel featuring a library that feels like it might go on for ever. We talk widely, with a topic list touching on semiotics, narrators (unreliable and otherwise), the apocalypse, and whether or not Christ laughed.