New Books In Science Fiction

The podcast New Books In Science Fiction, hosted by Rob Wolf, is possibly ineligible for a Hugo Award

Podcaster Rob Wolf interviews
authors about their new books.
(Image supplied)

for best fancast. And that’s a shame because it is one of the podcasts that consistently guide listeners to find deeper understanding and appreciation of genre works.

Every two or three weeks, Wolf sits down with an author who has a new novel (either upcoming or released in the past six months) and has an in-depth one-on-one chat with them about the book and their influences, about their career, and about the intellectual effort that went into the book.

Often, the result is revelatory.

An expert interviewer, Wolf approaches each author with an earnest enthusiasm that is frankly endearing. He asks thoughtful, succinct questions that drive at the heart of the matter, and gives his guests the time to respond fully and completely.

In the seven years he’s been hosting the podcast, Wolf has interviewed an all-star roster of science fiction authors such as Andy Weir, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Kameron Hurley, Ken Liu, Megan O'Keefe, Malka Older, and many, many more. Many of his earlier episodes from 2014–2015 may seem a little choppier, but what amazes us is how much enduring value older episodes in the series have. And, to be fair, most podcasts were choppier five years ago.

By any measure, 2020 was an extraordinary year for New Books in Science Fiction. With Stealing Worlds author Karl Schroeder, Wolf interrogates the book’s politics. In an episode about Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark provides insights about historicity and the creation of authentic, believable historical fantasy. At the beginning of the pandemic, Beneath The Rising author Premee Mohamed’s episode examined the difficulty of launching a book during lockdown. There was not a bad episode this year.

All of the novels listed above were ones that we enjoyed. But Wolf’s strength is that his podcast is worth listening to even when you either haven’t read — or didn’t enjoy — the book he’s featuring. He brings intellectual grist and empathy to everything he works on.

For us, the real highlight of 2020 was an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, who was speaking about his recent novel The Ministry For The Future. Wolf’s interview provided insight and context that helped members of our book club to appreciate the artfulness of a book that they had previously found pedantic and boring. A librarian in the book club says this makes him an honorary readers’ advisory librarian.

Although Wolf himself produces the podcast entirely on a volunteer basis, it is part of a larger “New Books Network” that has exactly one full-time professional employee who deals with a few technical matters such as hosting. This does raise questions about the Hugo eligibility of this podcast, despite the fact that everything that makes New Books In Science Fiction great is fannish, and fan-run.

Whether or not New Books In Science Fiction is Hugo-eligible, Rob Wolf’s work deserves to be celebrated. It’s a fancast that will be on our Hugo nominating ballots, just in case it makes a difference.

Six Wakes - Review

Mur Lafferty’s contributions to the science fiction community are laudable. Her work as a podcaster

(image via Goodreads)

is worth celebrating. Some of her previous books have been entertaining, particularly the Shambling Guide To New York. And her advocacy for new and emerging artists is something that deserves significant recognition.  

It is a shame, therefore, that Six Wakes — a novel with significant flaws — may be many peoples’ first introduction to Lafferty’s work.

Early last year, when Six Wakes first hit bookshelves, several members of our book club picked the book up in anticipation of a fun mystery in space. At that time, we decided it was not a book we wanted to review, or to put on our nomination ballots.

Clearly, enough members of the World Science Fiction Society disagree with that assessment. To boot, those who select the Nebula shortlist also disagree with us. Our lack of esteem for this book appears to be a minority opinion.

So as we returned to the book for a more in-depth look after it was shortlisted, we struggled to ascertain why it had received this level of acclaim. While the world-building has interesting elements, and the set-up for the mystery is promising, Six Wakes suffers from structural issues, logical gaps, and stylistic blandness.

Lafferty’s decision to tell so much of the narrative in the form of flashbacks undermines the locked-

Lafferty (left) and Alasdair
Steward (right) at the Hugo
Awards in 2017.
Image by Henry Soderlund 

door mystery setup. Rather than offering us competing stories from unreliable narrators, we see definitive “true” versions of the past from an omniscient point-of-view. During the novel’s climax, this deflates much of the narrative tension.

The story’s set-up, which imagines a world in which the wealthy can live near-immortal lives through memory storage and cloned bodies, has enormous potential. But the “Codicils” which govern cloning make very little sense. It beggars belief to suggest that these extreme laws were created almost overnight, that those laws have withstood challenge, and that the wealthy and privileged wouldn’t use their societal power to prevent their voting rights from being stripped.

It feels like Lafferty has neglected to fully answer basic questions about class and societal privilege — which is surprising given how informed and nuanced she has been about these issues on her podcasts. She tries to explore these questions in Six Wakes, but her world-building is so perfunctory and built in service of the plot's conceits that it runs into logical inconsistencies under any scrutiny.

Finally, and most problematically, the sentence-by-sentence prose in Six Wakes is not up to the standard that one would expect from a Hugo Award-shortlisted work. At best, the writing is repetitious.

It pains us to be as negative about a book written by a person we like so well, and who we believe is capable of better work. Six Wakes will be at the bottom of most of our Hugo ballots, and for some of us, below ‘No Award.’