New Books in Science Fiction
Bestselling and award-winning science fiction authors talk about their new books and much more in candid conversations with host Rob Wolf. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction
Episodes
September 29, 2025 • 58 mins
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we conclude our analysis of the FX series Alien: Earth with episode 7, “Emergence” and episode 8, “The Real Monsters.”
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September 15, 2025 • 52 mins
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we continue our analysis of the FX series Alien: Earth with episode 5, “In Space, No One…” and episode 6, “The Fly.”
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September 11, 2025 • 51 mins
What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China?
That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone (Columbia UP, 2025), written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion, and then to the fantastical “Realm of Civilization,” a world that, in Wu’...
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September 6, 2025 • 25 mins
This interview is with one of the translators, M. Lynx Qualey.
A girl must save herself and her family after discovering her society's secrets in this sci-fi novel in translation.
I Want Golden Eyes (U Texas Press, 2025) is set on the Comoros Islands at the end of this century in a futuristic city called Quartzia, the home of a genetically privileged minority called the Golden Eyes. The rest of the population, the Limiteds, live...
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September 4, 2025 • 54 mins
It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we continue our analysis of the FX series Alien: Earth with episode 3, “Metamorphosis” and episode 4, “Observation.” We continue to investigate the series’ dominant problematic of crossing boundaries, and hypothesize as to the reason for its divisiveness: it’s generic placement somewhere between science fiction and fairy tale.
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September 2, 2025 • 54 mins
A magnificent cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025) charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.
As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution ...
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August 7, 2025 • 46 mins
With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson 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, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-bur...
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Superhero violence and graphic action sequences are prevalent on the screen and on the page, but this book takes an alternative route with practical guidance, frameworks, and tools for incorporating the principles of peacebuilding and nonviolence into compelling fiction. By mapping a path less travelled but just as vital in divisive times, in n A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism (Bloomsbury, 2025) Dr. Ga...
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June 21, 2025 • 34 mins
NBN host Hollay Ghadery interviews Christy Climenhage, the author of the highly-anticipated science fiction thriller, The Midnight Project (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) Julie E. Czerneda, author of To Each This World, calls this novel “an absolute triumph.”
About The Midnight Project:
In this near-future science fiction thriller, Christy Climenhage has created a frighteningly real world on the verge of collapse. As disaster strikes, the...
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June 7, 2025 • 34 mins
In this NBN episode, Hollay Ghadery speaks with Lindsay Wong about her short story collection, Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality (Penguin, 2023).
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BC AND YUKON JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKESFrom the bestselling, Canada Reads-shortlisted author of The Woo-Woo comes a wild, darkly hilarious, and poignant collection of immigrant horror stories. They’ll haunt and consume you—in strange and unsettl...
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May 18, 2025 • 56 mins
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with the conclusion to the series. We break down, analyze, and explain the political themes in these finale episodes, focusing on freedom, order and their interconnectedness in both the rebellion and the Empire. We explore the extent to which farce is an operative mode of storytelling in this arc. And we consider Cassian's statement that "nothing is ending," fin...
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May 11, 2025 • 67 mins
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 7-9.
We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the question of when in a rebellion must you break cover and insist - publicly - on the truth. We see a second major theme of this arc as discipline. The rebellion is moving from a para-military to a military posture, and requires increasing discipline from its members as it does so. F...
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May 3, 2025 • 53 mins
It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 4-6. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the mirrored political challenges faced by figures from the Empire and the Rebellion. We see a big theme of these episodes as “too much information,” as both sides struggle to distinguish friend from foe, signal from noise, the authentic from the inauthentic. We discuss classic politica...
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April 26, 2025 • 49 mins
It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we react to Andor Season 2, episodes 1-3. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the motives and aims of the rebellion and the Empire. Both sides have major coordination problems in these episodes, although the causes are very different. We explain and analyze the recurrent problems of authoritarian control and rebellion against it, and the way Andor comments upon them. We see a ...
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April 24, 2025 • 48 mins
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.
...
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February 4, 2025 • 48 mins
You Must Take Part In Revolution is a mind-bending graphic novel by award-winning journalist Melissa Chan and acclaimed dissident artist Badiucao. A near-future dystopia in the vein of George Orwell's Animal's Farm, the book explores technology, authoritarian government, and the lengths to which one will go in the fight for freedom. Three idealistic young people, forever changed by the real-life protests in Hong Kong in 2019, devel...
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January 19, 2025 • 37 mins
Ben Berman Ghan is the author of the bestselling novel, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024).
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is a gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction. With elements of science fiction and horror dropped in amongst stunning literary prose, the debut novel spans centuries, covering humanity’s colonization of the moon, a war with alien beings, AI minds governing Canada, and a gia...
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December 31, 2024 • 49 mins
After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate T...
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December 24, 2024 • 23 mins
Suzy Krause’s latest speculative fiction novel, I Think We’ve Been Here Before (Radiant Press, 2024) is a compulsively readable and cosy story.
Marlen and Hilda Jorgensen’s family has received two significant pieces of news: one, Marlen has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Two, a cosmic blast is set to render humanity extinct within a matter of months. It seems the coming Christmas on their Saskatchewan farm will be their la...
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December 23, 2024 • 44 mins
With this dry observance Peter Darbyshire introduces us to Cross, a man who has lived thousands of years, though he’d prefer not to have, and who is now hunting angels in a Barcelona filled with tourists, phone cameras and deep mystery.
The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (Poplar Press, 2024) is a layered supernatural thriller, filled with history, magic and beloved characters. When an angel promises to deliver Judas, a forgotten god of a forg...
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