We kick off Season 6 with Kate Marshall, friend of the show and author of the forthcoming book Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century. Hosts and producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Kate about the pulpy literary history of weird tales and learn how in the 21st-century weirdness emerges as both genre and mood. The conversation roves from the weirdness of the weather to novels that long for the nonhuman and reach for alien perspectives to the genres responding to our climate crisis. Join us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 6 of Novel Dialogue and to explore our contemporary state of weird.Mentions:

--Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

--Roberto Bolaño on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

--Megan Ward, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character

--David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind

--Kasuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

--Elvia Wilk, Oval

--Olga Ravn’s The Employees

--Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

--Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices