Thursday, April 30, 2020

Linkout/Announcement: Quarantine Digital Book Tour with Spectology

I've joined with the inestimable folks at Spectology to edit & sometimes(/mostly?) host a series of "Digital Book Tours," to provide a space for speculative fiction authors whose book tours have been interrupted by COVID-19. You might remember Spectology from when I talked about Samuel R. Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand with them in December, or when I called them my 8th favorite podcast of 2018.

The first episode came out on Tuesday, where I interviewed El Lam about their book Goldilocks, which came out in the UK today and is coming out in the US May 5th. The book was a really neat read - it features five women who steal a spaceship in a climate-ravaged, fascistic near future in order to found a utopian society on a new planet, and does a great job of being both thriller-paced and pausing for character development & striking images. And it does a phenomenal job of drawing characters whose class position defines them against their desires, which is a phenomenal achievement, imo. That's a reductionist reading, but I'm trying to be brief, okay.

Anyway, support Goldilocks when it comes out & subscribe to Spectology, because there's a grip of good conversations about SF novels there already &, yknow, you probably miss my irrepressible giggle. It's terrible podcast audio, but it's irrepressible, so.