podcasts – Rob Wolf

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR1151734595.mp3 According to Merriam-Webster, noir is “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled, cynical characters and bleak, sleazy settings.” The Cambridge Dictionary says noir shows “the world as being unpleasant, strange, or cruel.” Nick Harkaway‘s new novel Titanium Noir (Knopf, 2023) has all that but with a twist—rather than the fedora-wearing detective hired...

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN4519264998.mp3 Gareth L. Powell’s Descendant Machine is set about 200 years in the future, and yet the recent explosion in A.I. technology suggests Powell’s imagined future—in which the minds of humans and A.I.s are symbiotically enmeshed—is just around the corner. The Bristol author’s new novel centers around a mysterious machine called the Grand Mechanism, an [&#8...

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN3520573459.mp3 Leslye Penelope’s latest novel, The Monsters We Defy (Redhook, 2022), takes readers to a version of 1920s Washington D.C. where bootleggers, powerful spirits, and humans blessed (and burdened) with enchantments engage in an epic battle over peoples’ destinies. Penelope’s protagonist, Clara Johnson, is based upon a real person—a woman who, as a teenage...

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8631369648.mp3 In their new novel, The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz leaps 60,000 years into the future, redefining ideas of peoplehood, democracy and love. A diverse array of characters—hominids, animals, and objects that in 2023 are still considered inanimate, such as doors and trains—are “people” in this multi-generational story about a corporation terraforming th...

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN6305157066.mp3 In Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion (Orbit, 2022), the setting keep changing—the epoch, location, and technology—but the characters remain more or less the same as they carry out an expedition to a mysterious object at the behest of a private investor. The novel starts on a tall ship in the early 1800s in waters in the […]

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN1463736781.mp3 People have always cared about their social status and how others perceive them, but advances in technology have changed how we ascend the social ladder, giving us new tools to manipulate our image and new measures of success as we seek “friends,” “likes” and the ever-elusive virality. In Joma West’s debut novel Face, climbing […]

  https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN3410067639.mp3 The Women Could Fly is set in our contemporary world with one big difference. A belief in witches gives rise to laws and a culture that encourages women to be married by the age of 30, locking them in a 1950s-style domesticity with the threat that they can be burned at the stake […]

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8385677875.mp3 One could call The Kaiju Preservation Society a pandemic novel because a) John Scalzi wrote it during the pandemic and b) the pandemic serendipitously leads the main character, Jamie, to a new job that sets the action in motion. But the book is not about the pandemic. It’s about Kaiju, Godzilla-like monsters who live […]

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2817428611.mp3 Few writers are as qualified to set their book in a circus as Khan Wong, who has not only performed in a circus but is an internationally recognized hula hoop virtuoso. While Wong’s descriptions of acrobats, clowns and fortunetellers are grounded in real life, the pleasure moon that is the setting of his debut […]

https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8530928015.mp3 Tochi Onyebuchi’s new novel Goliath features a phenomenon familiar to those of us who live in cities—gentrification. Like the gentrifiers of today, who push out old-timers with high rents and coffee boutiques, Onyebuchi’s urban colonizers are taking over property in communities that have suffered from underinvestment and systemic racism. But unlike ge...