Episode 121: Transcript

Episode: 121 Books to Devour This Winter

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast about science fiction and everything else that folded time and space so many times that there ended up being a permanent crease and then we had to go to the dry cleaners and there was a whole thing.

[00:00:12] I’m Charlie Jane Anders, I’m the author of the young adult Unstoppable trilogy that ends with this April’s Promises Stronger Than Darkness. I’m also currently writing the New Mutants comic from Marvel Comics.

Annalee: [00:00:25] And I’m Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who also writes science fiction and my new novel, The Terraformers, is coming this January, so you can pre-order it now. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:35] Today we're actually gonna be talking about books. We're gonna be talking about books that we highly recommend, brain snarfing during this winter festive season. You know, just snarf those books with your brain. Just do it. Just like open your brain mouth and just shove them in. There's literally no reason to go outdoors right now.

Annalee: [00:00:52] I mean, if you wanna go outside to like recharge your brain with the solar cells that you have attached to your scalp, like that's fine. We'll allow that. But otherwise, just, just stay indoors. Just read a book.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:05] Yeah, just keep that battery indicator hovering around 20%. You should be fine. You know, you don’t need to power it up to 100%. 

Annalee: [00:01:09] I've heard that 30%, 30%.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] 30% is the standard.

Annalee: [00:01:13] Yes. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] 30% is the brain standard. 

Annalee: [00:01:13] That's what we learned in The Afterparty is that there's actually…

Charlie Jane: [00:01:15] That's true. 

Annalee: [00:01:16] This sort of politeness level of allow people charge up to 30% and then you can take the outlet.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:22] That's so true. and you know, so the books we're gonna be recommending pretty much all came out in 2022, but we might sneak in one or two that came out in previous years and, you know, what are years anyway. 

[00:01:33] And in the second half of the episode we'll be talking about some themes that we've been seeing in this year's books and some of the kind of things that we think people are writing about a lot now.

[00:01:42] And speaking of the after party as we just did, in our mini episode on Patreon next week we'll be talking about some recent TV shows that we highly recommend pouring into your eyeballs, just like saturate those eyeballs. And we've got a pretty long list because this has been a pretty baller year for television.

Annalee: [00:02:02] By the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent? That means it's funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon. So, if you are feeling like giving, this year, to support a podcast that you really like or that you tolerate listening to while you're cooking or going for a walk, we would love it if you could support us on Patreon, we recommend five bucks, and that gets you the mini episodes, that gets you membership in our wonderful Discord server where we hang out all the time and have great conversations with folks who listen to the pod. And we do it all thanks to your support. So please support us. We're at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.

[00:02:48] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]

Charlie Jane: [00:03:16] All right, so before we get started, I just wanted to say that we definitely will not be able to talk about all of our favorite books from the last year in the time that we have.

[00:03:24] So I actually have been reviewing science fiction and fantasy for The Washington Post, and I wrote kind of a roundup of the year's best science fiction and fantasy books there and we'll be linking to that in the show notes. 

[00:03:33] So let's just dive in. Annalee, tell me about a recent book that you highly recommend for winter reading. 

Annalee: [00:03:40] So one of my favorites this year was the novella Spear by Nicola Griffith, which is a retelling of the Parsifal myth from Arturian Legend, except the Parsifal character is a super badass lesbian who is in search of her identity. She's not sure who she is, and let's just say she's incredibly good with a spear, obviously. The eponymous spear, but also she has a dalliance, this is not really a spoiler, she has dalliances with some of your favorite enchanted characters from the Arthurian legend.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:22] Oohh.

Annalee: [00:04:25] So maybe I won't give away who it is, but it is a typical Nicola Griffith book in that it is gorgeously written, beautiful evocations of the natural world in the medieval period, hot lesbian sex, amazing fight scenes. It is the perfect book for a cup of tea next to the fire. What is your pick next?

Charlie Jane: [00:04:46] You know, I'm just gonna start off with what might actually be my favorite book of 2022. Just gonna like, jump right in with like my number one pick. 

Annalee: [00:04:56] Awesome. 

Charlie Jane: [00:04:56] Which is The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings, which is, it's an incredible book. I couldn't stop yelling about it after I read it. It's basically a book set in a world where everybody kind of knows or believes that witchcraft is real, and there's all these anti-witchcraft laws that basically are like, you need to prove that you're not a witch. If you're a woman who's not married to a man to a cis man by the age of 30, you need to prove that you're not a witch, which means regular testing and surveillance and stuff. And a few women choose to just openly identify as witches, and they are prevented from going near any major infrastructure. They can't travel without permission. Their lives are incredibly hard and It's about basically like, it's a very thinly veiled kind of metaphor for all the ways that society does try to control women, specifically Black women because the main character is a Black woman who's actually mixed race. But she discovers the hard way that a lot of these rules fall much more heavily on Black and brown people then on white people. They are unevenly applied, which is true of many, many rules governing women in the real world.

Annalee: [00:06:03] I know. I was gonna say, sounds strangely familiar. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:06] And it's just, it’s one of those books that a good chunk of it just feels like a really grounded, relatable story of a young person having a quarter life crisis and trying to figure out her love life and trying to figure out who she wants to be and all this stuff.

[00:06:23] It's very rooted in everyday life and feels very well observed and very rich in detail. But then there's this kind of gonzo thing about witchcraft, which eventually does kind of pay off in a really beautiful way.

[00:06:36] Annalee, tell me about another book that you just think everybody should be reading this year.

Annalee: [00:06:44] So I wanted to recommend Siren Queen by Nghi Vo, which is about a period in Hollywood history that is incredibly romanticized, which is the pre-code period before we had ratings on movies in the teens and twenties. 

[00:07:02] It's about a Chinese-American actress who is trying to make her way in Hollywood and get parts that are not completely stereotyped, but at the same time, she kinda loves being able to play demonic characters, and the entire story is infused with magic and kind of gothic weirdness.

[00:07:24] And it really reminded me of a lot of Nghi Vo’s novel from last year. The Chosen and the Beautiful, which is also set in the 1920s. It's a retelling of the Gatsby story and it's also about an Asian American woman who's kind of coping with the weird racism of that period which is its own distinct thing from the weird racism of our own period.

[00:07:45] And the thing about Vo is that her prose. I don't normally say this about prose, but it is lush. This is kind of an overused term, but it genuinely is beautifully lush and there's a really nasty, poisonous edge to it that is perfect for this kind of storytelling because it's all about the wealthy, the powerful, the influencers of the early 20th century and how they consumed and spat out marginalized people and kind of fetishized them, but also demonized them.

[00:08:20] Literally, in the case of both of these stories and I just… reading a Vo novel is very much about enjoying the vibe as well as her incredibly great plotting and just juicy storytelling. So again, the new book is called Siren Queen, but I also recommend reading it alongside The Chosen and the Beautiful.

[00:08:43] Okay. What's your next pick? . 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:45] Yeah. I mean, my next pick is another book that when I read it, I just could not stop running around flapping my arms and just grabbing random people on the street and being like, you have to read this book. I feel like that's, those are the kind of books that you really just want to like, that deserve to be kind of brought up.

And so that book is. The Story of the Hundred Promises by Neil Cochrane, which is, it's a fantasy novel. It's about a transgender sailor named Darragh, who when he was younger, he was like feeling depressed because he was trans and he was being misgendered by everybody in his life and everything. And this enchanter comes and finds him and offers him a spell that will transform his body into the male body that reflects who he really is.

[00:09:27] And so now he kinda left his family behind. He's become a sailor, but his sister shows up and says, “Hey, our dad is dying and this is your last chance to say goodbye.” And he sort of gets sucked into going on this journey to kind of reunite his family, but also in the end, to find out about this enchanter who gave him this spell that allowed him to have the right body.

[00:09:47] And he kind of discovers two sets of stories about this enchanter one set that is very kind of like, a hagiography of like how this enchanter is a wonderful, beneficial person. And then a very dark kind of negative demonizing set of stories about how this enchanter is actually a monster and a fiend and stuff.

[00:10:06] And he has to kind of sort out the truth from the lies and eventually does discover the real person behind all of it. And it's just, it's full of trans and non-binary and genderqueer people and neo pronouns and just everything. And it's such a warm kind of kind book, but with like a really sharp edge to it, and it really does kind of use the fairytale stuff to really, really good effect. I love that book so much. 

[00:10:28] Okay, Annalee, hit me. 

Annalee: [00:10:30] All right, let's continue the amazing trans books trend here. I really cannot recommend enough Izzy Wasserstein's short story collection, All the Hometowns You Can't Stay Away From. Like Vo, Wasserstein is just an incredible prose stylist. She's able to go from kind of light and funny to incredibly dark and mournful and beautiful.

[00:10:58] This collection has science fiction, it has fantasy, it has kind of science fantasy, which is a thing that I love. And characters who are grad students, characters who are monsters. It's just a great feast and it's her first book, so this is your chance to catch a rising star in All the Hometowns You Can't Stay Away From.

[00:11:17] What's your next pick? 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:20] I love Izzy's writing. Okay. My next pick you know what, we're gonna keep the trans writing, party going. 

Annalee: [00:11:28] Keep the train going. The Trans train. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:30] Trans train. Yeah, that's right. Totally. 

Annalee: [00:11:33] Get on with the trans train. Sorry. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:35] You know, I think I'm, I think you might have read this book, too. Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman. 

Annalee: [00:11:39] Yes. Definitely one of my favorites. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:41] It’s got some dark academia. It's got some great stuff. It's basically a story about a vampire who is an archivist who is kind of assigned to handle the archive of a recently dead writer who created a TV show that's sort of like a lesbian X-Files in the 1990s, a fictional TV show. It didn't actually exist in real life, unfortunately. I wish it had. 

Annalee: [00:12:03] Yeah, it sounded great.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:06] And Isaac. You know, full disclosure, Isaac's a friend, which is part of why I couldn't mention Dead Collections in The Washington Post, but—

Annalee: [00:12:11] And he was on our podcast.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:11] And he was on our podcast. He’s amazing. But Dead Collections has like a take on vampires that I've never seen before that I just completely adore, where basically vampires are really fragile.

Like he casually mentions about halfway through the book. Vampires don't tend to last more than three years after they become vampires. Even though supposedly they're immortal, they can live forever. You know, just the whole business of staying out of the sunlight for the up to like 14 hours a day that the sun is out, turns out to be a real pain for anybody who's trying to hold down a job. For anybody who's trying to like just have a life. Not going outdoors for like the majority of the day, most of the time is really challenging. 

[00:12:52] And so it actually ends up being like that vampires are not doing great in this world and it's also an amazing romance and everybody's kind of queer and it's just, it's such a beautiful book.

Annalee: [00:13:02] I loved it too. And it also has a lot of commentary on disability because part of what makes vampires fragile is of course they have to get blood infusions all the time. And so Fellman really evokes that feeling of being. It's kind of like a cross between like getting an infusion for say, colitis or being in like, a clinic for, any kind… like dialysis and they're just sitting there for hours getting these infusions and it's just this incredibly debilitating condition that they're coping with. So I loved that. 

[00:13:40] Okay, my next pick is gonna be one of a couple science books I wanna recommend ‘cause I do have a science nerd side. So The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a fantastic look at all of the different ways that civilization could have developed and did develop, historically, that did not fit with any of the models of civilization that we are taught in school.

[00:14:10] We’re taught in school, to the extent that we're taught at all about how civilization works, that people start out in little villages, eventually they form cities and hierarchy and develop money and develop taxing systems and develop monarchies and then develop empires. And that's kind of the standard story of civilization that's taught in the West. And Wengrow, who is an archeologist and David Graeber, of course, who sadly passed away before this book came out was a world famous sociologist and who wrote the book, Debt: The First 5000 Years. You put the two of them together and they just tell this incredibly compelling story about how our vision of civilization is actually just one of like dozens that people were testing out all the way up until basically the 18th century when European imperialism kind of rewrites the face of politics around big parts of the globe. 

[00:15:07] And one of my favorite insights from the book, and there are many, it's basically like a big book of like Uncle David and Uncle David telling you amazing politicized stories from history.

[00:15:19] But they really foreground the fact that what we think of as the enlightenment in the west, when people started using science and rationality to explore the world around us, that actually the enlightenment was inspired by philosophers of the 18th century speaking with indigenous people in the Americas and getting their perspective and kind of incorporating that perspective, a critical perspective on western culture, into their ideas.

[00:15:47] They both talk about very famous indigenous philosophers and the books that were written about them and how these books would've been widely known and now they're kind of forgotten. So it's kind of an alternate history of civilization. And it is really delightful. If you love archeology, if you love ancient history, if you love just hearing two anarchists, stick it to the man with lots of footnotes, definitely check out The Dawn of Everything. 

[00:16:16] Okay, what's your next pick? 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:18] Okay, I'm gonna also pick a non-fiction book next just to kind of be a cool rebel ‘cause that's what all the cool kids are doing now. And I think you might've also read this book, Sexed Up by Julia Serrano, who is another friend and another trans author.

And Sexed Up is basically Julia kind of looking at how we objectify people and how objectification is tied into our ideas about sexual assault and rape, but also our ideas about consent generally and our ideas about basically men and women and gender and it's Julia kind of poking at some of the themes that she's written about in some of her other work, but I think actually getting deeper into them because it's through this lens of sexualization and so this idea that men are all trying to get sex and women are all withholding sex from men, which powers so much of our most toxic cultural tropes, she kind of deconstructs that really beautifully and kind of gets to the bottom of it in a way that I found really compelling.

Annalee: [00:17:16] Love it. Loved that book. 

[00:17:19] Okay, here's another nonfiction pick. This is a book that just came out in early December. It's called Pests by Bethany Brookshire, and it is about how we demonize animals. And she picks a number of commonly known quote unquote “pests” like rats and pigeons, and kind of just deconstructs the way that science has treated them and the way that they've been treated in sort of common wisdom and really reveals that there's this whole process behind what kinds of non-human animals get labeled pests that need to be exterminated. 

[00:18:00] And it's incredibly funny, insanely well researched, Brookshire traveled all over the world during COVID interviewing people about the animals that she talks about in the book. And it's just a fun ride. And you are gonna be so much smarter when you're done. So, Pests by Bethany Brookshire.

[00:18:17] Okay, another pick, Charlie Jane.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:19] That sounds amazing. Okay, so slightly changing gears. A book I just read, which just came out at the end of November, is called The Red Scholar’s Wake by Alliette de Bodard, and you wanna talk about an amazing hot lesbian romance. Oh my God, this book is incredible.

Annalee: [00:18:36] Yeah, I wanna talk about that.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:38] Yeah, you need to read this book, Annalee. You will love it.

Annalee: [00:18:42] I’m so excited for it.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:42] It is a romance between a sentient pirate ship and a data analyst. And the sentient pirate ship is named Rice Fish and the data analyst is named Xich Si. I'm probably mispronouncing that a lot, but basically the data analyst who's kind of the main character gets captured by pirates and thinks that she's gonna be just locked up forever and maybe indentured, maybe treated horribly. But instead, this human avatar of this pirate ship comes to her and says, I really need your help with something, and in order to make sure that you are protected, I'm going to marry you. But it's just an arranged marriage. It's just a business arrangement. We're not actually romantically involved. I'm just gonna make you my wife and it's gonna be a formality. 

[00:19:24] But then of course it becomes more than that and they, and it's just such a beautiful book and it's got like starship battles and pirate politics and daring escapes and all that kind of stuff. But it's also just got like amazing romance involving like bots and like, you know, virtual overlays and just it's such a gorgeous book and it's only available as an ebook in the United States. It's available as a hard copy book in Europe, I guess, but it's well worth finding wherever you get your eBooks. 

[00:19:59] Okay. One last pick, Annalee.

Annalee: [00:20:02] My final pick is a book that I've talked about here before because I just was blown away by it. It's called The Daughter of Dr. Moreau by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia.

[00:20:12] And it's, as you might guess from the title, a retelling of the story of Dr. Moreau, who is the evil, mad scientist who is, on a remote island, uplifting animals like turning non-human animals into sort of humanoid enslaved creatures and using all kinds of terrible torture. And in the original novel, it's set, I believe, in the Caribbean and Moreno-Garcia relocates it to the Yucatan and deals with the politics there, with the indigenous folks and the Spanish colonizers. And of course this fits in nicely with a lot of the stories that we've already been talking about that deal with colonization and kind of science magic. In this case, it's just straight up science.

[00:20:56] And it’s from the point of view of one of Dr. Moreau’s creations / his daughter and her growing realization that she's living in this sort of manufactured dystopia that her dad has created through drugs and through horrible experiments on vulnerable people. 

[00:21:20] So it's kind of about anti-colonial uprisings but grafted onto this story of domestic scientific cruelty and as usual, with a lot of the picks here that I've been talking about, part of the joy of this book is the prose. It's beautifully written. It's full of darkness, but also hope and I just love these character. The daughter of Dr. Moreau is just, I would, I would die for her. She is amazing and so I highly, highly recommend this one. 

[00:21:55] What's your final pick, Charlie Jane?

Charlie Jane: [00:21:58] My final pick is Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers, which is the second, and I don't know, possibly final book in Becky's Robot and Monk or Monk and Robot series that began with A Psalm for the Wild-Built, and it's just so, just gorgeous. The writing is amazing, like how she writes about nature and technology, and it's basically like, I obviously love odd couples and I love books that think about nature and technology together. And Becky does that in a really fascinating, wonderful way with this story of a monk named Sibling Dex, who teams up with a robot named Moss Cap and they sort of travel around.

[00:22:36] In the second book they actually visit a lot of human settlements. And we get to see them interacting with this kind of post scarcity, post capitalist society that Becky has created, which, feels very lived in and very real and very kind of warm and welcoming, and you just wish that you could live there for good. 

[00:22:55] And I wanna finish up before we get to the second half by just mentioning in passing a book that you and I both loved, whose author we recently had on the podcast, The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia. We just featured Naseem, like I said, and we both adored that book. 

Annalee: [00:23:12] Yes, that was definitely one of my favorite books of the year for sure. Like it was politically incredibly savvy, but the politics were just folded beautifully into this world building around an incredible magical city, and the characters were immediately lovable and arresting.

[00:23:33] Also it's a fucking murder mystery, which is delightful. Like, I just, I love that it was just like, no, what we're doing here is we're trying to figure out who's killing all these people using magic, but also there's this whole amazing world that they've built around this.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:46] And it's got a lot of great medical stuff. It’s actually a great version of like fantastical medical science and how you would incorporate magic and mystical healing stuff into a proper medical setting, which I feel like I don't see often enough. 

Annalee: [00:24:05] No… Magical forensics needs to be a thing. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:09] Magical forensics, yes. For sure.

[00:24:13] Okay, so we're gonna take a really short break. And when we come back, we're gonna talk about all the trends that we're seeing in this year's great books.

[00:24:21] [OOAC theme plays]

Annalee: [00:24:26] So we have a bunch of trends that we wanna talk about that we've been seeing in books this year, and we're just gonna go through them in no particular order. This also obviously reflects books that we've been reading, and they're not definitive . There's other trends that we may not have identified, and we'd love to hear from you about what those are.

[00:24:43] So Charlie Jane, why don't you start with a trend that you have noticed. Tell us what it is.

Charlie Jane: [00:24:49] So we were just talking about Naseem Jamnia, and obviously they were in our episode about empires and kind of colonization and colonialism, and their book is one of a bunch in the past, like I would say, couple of years that are about fighting against colonizers and empires and kind of waking up from the dream of empire in a weird way.

[00:25:10] In 2021, there were some really great ones like She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan and The Unbroken by CL Clark, who we also had on the podcast, and these books often feature indigenous people, native people who have kind of been co-opted and reeducated by colonizers, but then kind of wake up and rejoin their own people and join the fight against the colonizing force.

[00:25:32] And arguably, the biggest book, like the most kind of successful and impactful book of 2022, which I loved, was Babel by R.F. Kuang, and it's a brilliant book about linguistics mages who use these silver bars to capture the energy from slightly different meanings of the same word in two different languages.

[00:25:52] And these bars of silver with like these linguistic translation things power the entire British Empire. And through that device, R.F. Kuang is able to kind of take all these anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist trips to the next level, but combines them with some really clever use of dark academia. 

[00:26:09] And so, you know, Annalee, tell us about another trend that was big this year, please.

Annalee: [00:26:11]Yeah, before I do that, I wanted to mention that we actually had R.F. Kuang on here a couple of years ago talking about The Poppy War when that first came out. And she told us a lot about her background as a historian and how she puts that into her books. So I think that's another way in which dark Academia has crept into her books.

[00:26:33] And it's also just a big theme this year, like you said. It's one of my favorite vibes or aesthetics, dark academia, which we also did an episode on, so you can listen to that. We'll link to all this stuff in the show notes. I was kind of thinking about why dark academia is really blowing up right now.

[00:26:51] I mean obviously not just this year, but this year we did have a number of really big books in that area. One thing that's going on, of course, is that over the course of the pandemic, academia took on a really new meaning, especially for folks I think, who were in high school and college. It became kind of a wish, you know, like there was this yearning to go back to school because, Zoom school wasn't that great. I'm sure there were a few people who liked it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:27:22] No.

Annalee: [00:27:22] Most people found it really annoying and they missed their friends. They missed getting a chance to go away from home to college. I knew so many people who had kids who were supposed to be freshmen in like 2020, 2021, and their whole lives were derailed and just sort of put on hold.

[00:27:47] And so I think that dark academia has become this genre that's escapist because it's this fantasy of going away to school and like getting to have adventures, even if they're kind of creepy, fucked up adventures. The other thing about dark academia, especially this past couple of years, is that we are now living through a moral panic in the United States that's relentlessly focused on education.

[00:28:13] We have the “Don't say gay” laws, which are all about preventing queer kids from expressing themselves in school. Preventing queer educators—

Charlie Jane: [00:28:21] And queer teachers, yeah.

Annalee: [00:28:24] I was gonna say, preventing queer educators from normalizing the idea of a healthy gay life, which is, you know, something that's not a controversial idea.

[00:28:35] Queerness has not been considered a form of deviance or mental illness for almost 50 years now, folks, so let's catch up. And there's also, all throughout the United States, there are bands on teaching critical race theory, which is really just a way of banning any kind of discussion of things like the history of enslavement in the United States. The history of genocide against indigenous tribes.

[00:29:05] I was thinking a lot about how Tracy Deonn’s new novel Bloodmarked, just came out. It's a sequel to Legendborn. This is a theme we had Tracy on the show talking about Legendborn. 

[00:29:17] Legendborn is classic dark academia. It's an Arthurian legend tale about a young woman who is attending a school that has a secret history related to how it used the labor of enslaved African Americans, how it incorporated slavery, kind of into its very nature and that history has been hidden and the main character, who is Black, has to uncover it by communing with her ancestors and hearing their stories.

[00:29:52] And the more I thought about it, the more I was like this series, the Legendborn series, and now the new book Bloodmark, they're basically like a sharp rejoinder to people who are saying, you know, we need to ban CRT. I mean, obviously they’re fun escapist books. I'm not saying that they're books with like big incoming message. They’re also just pure fun. But the point of the books is if you don't know this history, the history of enslavement in the United States, you are vulnerable to monsters. You will be destroyed. I love the fact that these books in their own way make a kind of pushback on that moral panic.

[00:30:32] Other books in the kind of dark academia zone, obviously there's the Scholomance series from Naomi Novik, which is just like burning up everyone's minds. People are really obsessed with it. There's a new book in that series that came out this year. The Golden Enclaves. Scholomance series is also all about how academia's really fucked up. It's all about a school where like if you fail to meet certain requirements, you're killed. And it's sort of like a horrible, destructive literalization of meritocracy or something like that where… So I think that there's an element of questioning academia and the value of academia in these books as much as they are also about kind of fetishizing it.

[00:31:19] Olivie Blake’s Atlas Six sequel, Atlas Paradox, also came out this year, and that's another fantastic dark academia book. Olivie Blake has said that she wanted her magic system to be like science, and that she based it on research that she'd been doing in quantum physics. And so it also touches on a theme that I love, which is basically fantasy as a way of talking about science or magic as a way of talking about science. And I think that that also runs through a lot of these books. 

Charlie Jane: [00:31:51] Yeah. Another one that kind of fits into that is The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. Which you know, is very dark academia and is very magic of science. And it's about people who the places that are fictional on maps that were added as copyright traps. It's a whole complicated history, but those places are actually real if you have the right map. And it's sort of… it’s sort of a magical way of thinking about places, but also magic as science. 

[00:32:18] Another thing I noticed in the past year that feels like a trend is just like kind of books that are sort of very casually super queer and everybody is trans or queer or non-binary, and it's not a big deal.

[00:32:32] I kind of refer to this as ambient queerness and we already mentioned Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman and The Bruising of Qilwa and The Story of the Hundred Promises and Prayer for the Crown Shy.

Annalee: [00:32:43] Izzy Wasserstein’s collection. 

Charlie Jane: [00:32:42] Yeah, for sure. And like also The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas has that a lot and Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane.

[00:32:53] I feel like I'm just scratching the surface. I feel like there's a ton of books in the past year where instead of it being like, well, there's one or two queer characters and they're awesome. It's just like, oh, nope, everybody's queer. I feel like my books are a little bit like that now, too. Even a few years ago, I couldn't have imagined reading that many books where it's not just that like, you know, you have a group of people who are queer and then there's the outside world. The world is queer and every random character you meet happens to have like a neo pronoun. 

[00:33:19] Oh, also The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg is another book that I love in the past year where that's true. 

[00:33:27] And this feels like a really unique moment in speculative fiction and in culture generally, and it is very much in the face of this giant, just obscene, calculated, cynical, moral panic against trans and gender nonconforming people that's been led by all of these right wing bigots hand in hand with disingenuous like center-left pundits who are trying to demonize trans and gender non-conforming people. And so to have all these books where it's like, nope! A world where we're all queer and trans and non-binary and genderqueer, that's an awesome world and that's not something that these people should be able to make you afraid of.

[00:34:08] I love that and I hope that this lasts. I hope that we actually can keep building this in the face of this moral panic and not just get swept away. 

[00:34:18] Okay, Annalee hit me with another trend, please.

Annalee: [00:34:20] So speaking of things that make us feel safe, which is I think part of what the ambient queerness trend is about, there's been a rise of what's being called cozy fiction.

[00:34:37] I think this is also probably inspired by the pandemic, when people desperately needed to feel cozy and safe. And one of the main examples of that is the book Legends and Lattes, which is just really burning up the bestseller lists right now. And this is a book by Travis Baldree about an orc who just decides, forget it. I don't wanna do pillaging anymore, I wanna just open a coffee shop. 

[00:35:08] It’s sweet. It isn't that it has no conflict. Of course there's, conflicts happen, there's difficulties, but it's very much like a drawing room, novel of manners sort of, or novel of lack of manners in some ways. 

[00:35:25] And you have Becky Chambers’ Robot & Monk books, which we already talked about, which are also about a world where people are not struggling to survive. Instead, they're struggling for things that are a little bit less life threatening. They're just figuring out who they are or who they wanna be in love with or what it means to be happy. 

[00:35:57] And another example is obviously TJ Clune is a big author who's doing what I might call cozy fiction. T Kingfisher, which is the pseudonym for Ursula Vernon, has a new book out this past year called Nettle and Bone, which is a great example of the cozy quest. It's a fairytale quest narrative. It is full of difficulties and setbacks, but it's also full of delight and cuteness. Like it opens with this amazing scene where a skeleton dog is being created by this necromancer, and it's objectively scary. Like this should be scary. Like this dog is being built out of bones and wire, but it's freaking adorable. 

[00:36:42] This is the beauty of cozy writing is that it takes things that should be scary or that maybe are scary and finds the sweetness in them. And you know, maybe this is a little bit of that sweet weird stuff that we've been talking about on and off. 

Charlie Jane: [00:36:57] I definitely think that it intersects, yeah. And you know, I mean, at the same time as there's been this like wave of cozy fiction, you've also seen this wave of really intense horror, a lot of which is super queer, a lot of which is like, just like in your face, blah! The world is actually kind of scary and terrible, which it is. And that's part of why people flock to cozy fiction. I feel like these are two kind of trends that are kind of almost going hand in hand, and they're both amazing. Like I think we need them both.

[00:37:23] I've heard great things about recent horror novels like by Sarah Gailey who wrote Just Like Home and Hailey Piper among others. Gretchen Felker-Martin made a huge impact this year with her kind of trans post-apocalyptic horror novel, Manhunt. There's just a lot of like, extremely queer kind of like outrageous horror right now.

[00:37:45] And I feel like we're also just seeing a lot of books that are dealing with grief and loss and kind of dark stuff in the wake of the COVID pandemic and just everything we've been through. And like a book that comes to mind is How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. And I'm guessing there's gonna be a lot more of that, soon, books that are kind of like finding ways to deal with just the tidal wave of grief from COVID. 

Annalee: [00:38:10] And I think the tidal wave of grief from some of the other stuff we've been talking about, like recovering from. colonial incursions and dealing with moral panics that insist that you are a monster even though you're just a person who's trying to have a job and drink a latte, you know what I mean? Just trying to get by kids.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:32] I mean, I am a monster, but it's not ‘cause I'm trans.

Annalee: [00:38:38] And you're like a cute monster. You know? 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:39] I’m like a friendly monster. Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:38:42] You’re more of a Pokemon. 

Charlie Jane: [00:38:42] I’m like Cookie Monster. 

Annalee: [00:38:44] Yeah, and you do fit into my pocket, so that’s very helpful.

Charlie Jane: It’s actually true. It's actually true. I do. 

Annalee: [00:38:49] So one of the other things that's going on, I think with this new wave of horror is that it's really political and one of the places that I see that happening is in Rebecca Roanhorse’s duology which started with Black Sun and the sequel Fevered Star came out this year. And NK Jemison’s duology, which started with The City We Became and then finished this year with The World We Make. Both of these books are dealing with something that Fritz Leiber called megapolisomancy.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:24] Love that word.

Annalee: [00:39:24] It's a term, I love the term so much. It comes from his novella, Our Lady of Darkness, which is actually about the city of San Francisco in the 1970s. And a dark spell that was cast on it by corporate real estate developers. And actually, that’s something that is very important to NK Jemison’s duology.

[00:39:48] It's all about how New York City is being wrecked by gentrification and evil otherworldly real estate developers from a realm of cosmic horror and Rebecca Roanhorse’s duology is set in Mesoamerica in some of the great North American indigenous cities. It's a secondary world, so they don't have the names that we give them in our world, but basically she's dealing with the civilization in Chaco Canyon, she's dealing with the Aztec world, the Mayan world, and a bit of Cahokia, my favorite indigenous city in North America. 

[00:40:24] And she's also very interested in how cities have magical properties and they reflect the political culture of the city. And her books are about an uprising against a very hierarchical regime that has created an underclass of people who are forbidden from participating fully in the city's ruling group and steering the future of the city.

[00:40:55] It’s all about how magic can transform those political relationships in the city and also transform the city physically. So I think there's just something going on right now with thinking through how our politics are a kind of magical force and that force can actually make physical changes around us in our infrastructure. It can also lead to, you know, people being killed which is another very dire and extremely physical result. 

[00:41:28] We're also seeing stuff like Devil House by John Darnielle, which came out this past year, and it also has a kind of megapolisomancy, but it's about the suburbs, so it's about evil of the suburbs. I would call it suburbomancy.

[00:41:42] And of course, John Darnielle is well known both for his music in The Mountain Goats and for his other novels, most notably Wolf and White Van, which was another kind of suburbomancy story about paper and pencil gamers and the darkness within their minds.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:56] Talking about dark and scary kind of stories, another thing that's dark and scary that we've seen a lot of in this past year is climate change stories and like, actually what I'm really loving about it is that we're getting climate change stories that are not just like scary disaster fiction, but that are actually kind of weirdly hopeful. 

[00:42:19] A book that just came out in December, The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton is actually a really beautiful story about someone who is born in the near future in Florida and basically watches Florida completely fall apart over the course of her life. It’s got a lot of sadness, it's got a lot of tragedy, but it's also got a lot of hope and building and things springing up in the ruins and chosen family. 

[00:42:46] I already mentioned The Unbalancing by RB Lemberg. Which really feels like a different, it's a magical climate disaster, but it also feels like a way of thinking about climate disaster that is very focused on survival.

[00:42:57] There are also a lot of books recently where climate change is just kind of happening in the background, like Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman and Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, by Akil Kumaraswarmy which are kind of just like weird books in which climate change is just kind of a fact of life, and it's one of the things that kind of puts pressure on everybody to kind of find ways to move forward. 

[00:43:20] And another book I read in the past year is Lark Ascending by Silas House, where a group of climate refugees flee the United States and try to get to Ireland, which is the last country that's letting in people fleeing the United States in the wake of some kind of climate disaster.

And it's very kind of, that one is very dark and upsetting, but in general, I think people are actually trying to imagine how are we gonna live after climate change? Not just like, how is climate change gonna mess everything up? 

Annalee: [00:43:48] I was just gonna add to your list of kind of hopeful books dealing with climate change, L.X. Beckett has a series with the books Gamechanger and Dealbreaker which are also about just like the nuts and bolts of how to survive. L.X. Beckett is the nom de plume of Alyx Dellamonica, who is just a terrific writer and has tons of incredible ideas about where we're going next.

[00:44:17] So another trend that I wanted to highlight, I'm just gonna take a little swerve into non-fiction books or books that are largely non-fiction. Which is that this past year and a half or so, there have been a ton of books about animals and animal consciousness. The top selling science writer, Ed Yong, who just won Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of COVID has a new book out called An Immense World, which is about animal senses and how animals can sense and feel things that humans can't. And if we think we're super awesome, we should just shut the hell up because, damn, other animals really have it going on. And he’s an incredibly funny, smart writer. And he really brings home the fact that there's a lot of stuff on this planet that we don't really understand, and there's a lot of stuff that we're missing, and maybe we should be paying attention to non-human animals a lot more than we really are.

[00:45:21] Mary Roach has a new book out. Love Mary Roach. Everything she does is hilarious and awesome. Her new book is called Fuzz and it's all about what happens when animals break the law. Who do you blame when a bear breaks into your shop and eats all of your pies, like, who do you arrest? So it's one of her usual books about a topic that seems impossible to talk about, that she then kind of wraps up into a really interesting exploration of how humanity looks at animals. 

[00:45:54] I already mentioned the book Pests by Bethany Brookshire, which is about demonizing animals and how we turn certain animals into bad guys. It's very, very different from Mary Roach's book, but it's dealing with some of the same issues about how humans project a lot of feelings onto non-human animals and don't really think about the reality of those animals' experiences. 

[00:46:17] Lucy Cook, who's a great writer who writes a lot about zoology, published a book this year called Bitch: On the Female of the Species, and it's about how female animals often get left out of studies, but also how female scientists often get left out of the field of zoology and how those two things kind of work together to once again give us a really incomplete understanding of how life works on this planet. 

[00:46:47] Also, Susan Orlean, who is, you know, famous for the movie adaptation that was inspired by her book The Orchid Thief. She put out a collection of essays called On Animals which is really remarkable and fun. 

[00:47:06] And all of this reminds me of this new novel that's just come out, The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Which is about octopus civilization. It's kinda borrowing from the language that these science journalists are using in their books to explore what it would be like if we finally acknowledged that octopuses are in fact, human equivalent in intelligence, except that they just have a very different approach to being smart. They just see the world completely differently than we do. 

[00:47:39] So I think that this trend, this is a nonfiction trend that’s spilling over into our fiction, and I find it really hopeful. It reminds me of the fact that humans are really slowly but surely trying to deal with climate change and environmental impacts that we're having. And part of the way that we're doing that is by acknowledging that maybe we're not the smartest, best, coolest animal on the planet. Maybe we're just one of millions of animals, and we should get used to trying to live in harmony with all of those life forms instead of pretending like we're the king of them all and they should just die and let us eat them.

[00:48:22] So sorry that got kind of dark there. It just makes me mad when people don’t think about other animals.

Charlie Jane: [00:48:28] I just want to throw in a shameless plug that I feel like your novel, The Terraformers deals with a lot of these same ideas in a really wonderful way and I can't wait for people to read it. So—

Annalee: [00:48:37] Me, too.

Charlie Jane: [00:48:37] We're pretty much out of time. There’s two trends I'm just gonna mention really quickly, like super lightning round. 

[00:48:46] One is you know, been seeing a lot of books in the past year that reimagine Chinese folk tales and great Chinese texts, like An Arrow to the Moon by Emily X.R. Pan. Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan, Strike The Zither by Joan He, and a ton of others. 

[00:49:01] Another trend that I've been really loving is books that are set kind of in the 19 teens, 1920s. Yes. Like Bindle Punk Bruja by Desideria Mesa and Chloe Gong has made a huge mark with her YA series set in 1920s, Shanghai. Laura Ann Gilman’s Uncanny Times takes place in 1913. There's just been a lot of great kind of early 20th century, I don't know if it's like diesel punk fiction. It’s just, I love the twenties as a setting and I think it's really fun also. 

Annalee: [00:49:33] Also the books that I mentioned by Nghi Vo, Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful are both set during this Gilded Age type of era.

[00:49:44] And although I guess Gilded Age is usually used to describe the late 19th century, but it kind of stretches up through the 1920s. 

[00:49:50] And I think part of this has to do with the fact that it kind of feels like we're going back to the 1920s. You know, there are these like robber baron billionaires who seem to control everything. There's a rise of fascism around the world. It's just, it's feeling kinda 1920s up in here. So a lot of us are revisiting that era in our imaginations and trying to figure out if there's something we can learn from it. Is there something that we did wrong in the twenties that we can do right this time? And also just to you know, re-experience a time that was really important to many of our civilizations across the planet. 

Charlie Jane: [00:50:32] Yeah, we probably just scratched the surface of all the amazing books that came out in the past year. Please, please, please come on Patreon, come on Discord, tweet at us. Let us know all the books we left out, and this is actually a good place to mention that you can find this podcast in all the places that podcasts are found. If you like us, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps a lot, and we already mentioned our Patreon, but I'm gonna mention it again. We're at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. Your support means everything to us. And if you're on our Patreon, then you can be on our Discord. And if you're on our Discord, then you're on our minds all the time and we can be chatting with you all the time, . And you know, we also—

Annalee: [00:51:13] It’s true.

Charlie Jane: [00:51:13] Now, as of like a week or two ago, thanks to Annalee, we now have a TikTok and an Instagram, you're gonna be seeing our faces doing things. It's gonna be really exciting.

[00:51:25] Want to just shout out our beloved and amazing and heroic producer, Veronica Simonetti, and also our—

Annalee: [00:51:28] Yay, Veronica!

Charlie Jane: [00:51:28] Music composer extraordinaire, Chris Palmer, both of whom are just amazing indispensable humans.

[00:51:38] And so that's our show. We'll be talking to you on Discord if you're in Discord. Otherwise, we'll be back in two weeks with another episode. And, you know, stay safe out there and keep reading. 

Together: [00:51:50] Bye.

[00:51:50] [OOAC theme music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.]