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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea saga has enchanted generations of readers and stands as a foundational classic of the fantasy genre. To mark publication of the definitive Library of America edition, acclaimed writers Karen Joy Fowler and Nghi Vo join volume editor Brian Attebery to kick off the fall LOA LIVE season with a fascinating plunge into these beloved novels of magic, dragons, nature, naming, and identity. LOA associate editor Stefanie Peters moderates. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The essential biography of the influential and beloved filmmaker George Lucas. On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored–and successful–movie franchises of all time. Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones in George Lucas: A Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2016) If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound. Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched. Brian Jay Jones is the author of the New York Times bestseller Jim Henson: The Biography, as well as Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of An American Imagination and Washington Irving: An American Original. His most recent book is The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building. He continues to believe that Han shot first. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, the editors and managing editor of Science Fiction Studies offer an inside look at the journal, discussing its place in the field and revisiting notable articles that have contributed to the study of science fiction. Science Fiction Studies is published three times a year by University of California Press. For more information about the journal, including subscription and submission information, please visit online.ucpress.edu/sfs. If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation. To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit ucpress.edu/support-us. Articles mentioned: Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.; Antimancer: Cybernetics and Art in Gibson's 'Count Zero.' Science Fiction Studies March 1995; 22 (1): 63-86. Link. John Rieder; On Defining SF, or Not. Science Fiction Studies July 2010; 37 (2): 191-201: Link. Paul Kincaid; Review: H.G. Wells: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Lourdes López-Ropero. Science Fiction Studies March 2026; 53 (1): 190-193: Link. Veronica Hollinger; Introduction: Women in Science Fiction and Other Hopeful Monsters. Science Fiction Studies July 1990; 17 (2): 129-135: Link. Darko Suvin; A, B, and C. The Significant Context of SF: A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Science Fiction Studies March 1973; 1 (1): 44-50: Link. Special Issue on Science Fiction and Postmodernism. Science Fiction Studies Nov. 1991: Link. A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals Phoenix Alexander is the Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian for Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside, and Book Review Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Stephen Darren Dougherty is Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at the University of Agder and an Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Colin Milburn is Distinguished Professor and Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities at the University of California, Davis, and an Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Patrick Sharp is Professor of Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and an Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Elizabeth (Lisa) Swanstrom is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Utah and an Editor of Science Fiction Studies. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

With thanks to “forever” plastics, the earth has reverted to sand and dust. Dylan has been raised by her scientist mother, in a pod under the sea, and longs to escape the loneliness of being confined. The only friend she ever had was a pen pal from Mars, who disappeared. With great effort, she’s escorted onto land, to the place of her mother’s employment where she becomes the groundskeeper. Unofficially, she begins studying sand. After a few years, the company sends her on a vacation and she meets Melanie, possibly a robot. Love flourishes on the floundering planet, but death is never far, and Dylan’s pen pal returns too late in Earth 7 (Graywolf Press 2026), a dystopian novel about the frailty of the planet, the ongoing need for scientific research, and the human struggle for survival. Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including the novels Barn 8 and Vacation, the memoir Revolution, finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, two story collections, and the graphic novel I, Parrot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over fifty magazines and journals, including Harper’s, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Capital Fellowship for Innovative Literature, fellowships from the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Ucross residencies.  She’s a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center, the New Writers’ Project, and she also directs the Pen City Writers, the prison creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary. Unferth founded and directs the Pen City Writers, a creative writing program for incarcerated men at a maximum-security prison in south Texas. The program has been running for ten years, and the students regularly win writing awards from Pen America and the Insider Prize. Their work has appeared in many places, including Vice, StoryQuarterly, the Texas Observer, the Stranger's Guide, and the Marshall Project. Deb and her friend, Lucy Corin, have gone on several research and writing trips together, including to the Sahara Desert for the sand; in 2024, they spent a month in the Arctic to see ice, trying to get as close to the North Pole as possible, and reaching the 82nd parallel. Last year, they rented two pods in a scrub desert Dark Sky area of the US to see darkness. Originally from Chicago, Unferth lives in Austin with philosophy professor Matt Evans. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical thought’s entanglement with literature in France, French SF can tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF. Guest Christina Lord is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a scholar of French and francophone studies and science fiction (sf) studies, she often writes about nonhuman beings in literary and visual storytelling. In addition to Reimagining the Human She has published essays in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Oeuvres et Critiques, Studies in the Fantastic, and European Comic Art, among others. She also serves as contributing editor for the section on “Speculative Studies in French” for the bibliographic journal, The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies. Her current research focuses on transnational and transmedial processes of circulation, recycling, and adaptation of sf imagery and narratives. Her current work focuses on the "alien aesthetic" of Denis Villeneuve’s sf films and the iconography of mid-twentieth century French comics, Valérian et Laureline. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to watch a double sunset on Tatooine, stand among the sand dunes of Arrakis or gaze at the gas-giant planet Polyphemus from the moon Pandora? In Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact (Reaktion, 2025), Keith Cooper explores the fictional planets of films such as Star Wars, Dune and Avatar, and discusses how realistic they are based on our current scientific understanding and astronomical observations. The real exoplanets astronomers are now discovering are truly stranger than fiction, as the author shows. Featuring insights from over a dozen scientists and award-winning science-fiction authors, including Charlie Jane Anders, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact is perfect for readers of popular science and fans of science fiction. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Flaxman Low, literature’s first professional, full-time “occult detective”—that is, an intrepid investigator who deploys the scientific method when tackling paranormal phenomena—appeared in a dozen stories first published from 1898–1899. Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (MIT Press, 2026), the latest edition to the Radium Age series from MIT Press, is introduced and discussed by Dr. Alexander B. Joy. Flaxman Low’s creators, the mother-and-son team Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard and Hesketh “Hex” Prichard (who published as “E. and H. Heron”), endowed the Oxford-trained psychologist with the bravery and acumen to tackle every sort of adversary from ghosts, mummies, and vampires to a mushroom mannequin. Both less credulous and less cynical than earlier fictional investigators of the spirit world, Low always triumphs in the end . . . but not before scientifically demonstrating that even the most outré incidents and situations can’t hold a candle to the bizarre capacities of the human mind. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the first two episodes of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. The show posits an extraordinary intervention in worldwide politics and culture producing a utopia (that is of course simultaneously a dystopia) of quiescent bliss. Is the show shaping up to be another hit for the showrunner, previously responsible for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul? Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.” Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.” Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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’s eyes, reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced Chinese beliefs. Liz Webber just released a new translation on New Story of the Stone, and joins us today to talk about this piece of literary fanfiction, and what political points Wu wanted to achieve by writing his work of early Chinese science fiction. Liz Evans Weber is currently an assistant professor of instruction in Chinese and research assistant professor at the University of Rochester in New York, where she teaches a wide range of courses on Chinese literature and a workshop course on Chinese-to-English literary translation. Her published translations also include the short story “Boundless Night” by Yu Dafu (Renditions, Spring 2021) In 2025, she was awarded a Translation Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts for work on her next translation project, Flower in a Sea of Resentment by Jin Songcen and Zeng Pu. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of New Story of the Stone. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 in a cavity called the Hive beneath the city. Dalia is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hive but works with her family in Quartzia at Professor Adam’s house, where she cleans, her sister grows organic food in the garden, and her deaf father works as the cook. Because books are forbidden in the Hive, Dalia secretly borrows math texts from the professor’s library and smuggles them to read in the Hive. When Professor Adam, who is famous for engineering embryos with enhanced genes, discovers Dalia’s crime, he enslaves her for two years in his library. Dalia seeks to flee the city with her family after overhearing the professor being ordered to design genetic traits for the president’s expected baby and realizes that Golden Eyes are not privileged by nature’s selection, as she was led to believe, but by authority and money. Maria Dadouch is a Syrian novelist, screenwriter, and children’s book author. She is the author of The Planet of Uncertainties, I Want Golden Eyes, The Heart is Behind the Rib, and other books, for which she has won several prestigious prizes. M. Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She is the founder of ArabLit. Her translated works include Wild Poppies, Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, and the Thunderbird trilogy. Sawad Hussain  is a translator from Arabic. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories. Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” Susana M. Morris is the Associate Professor of Literature, Media & Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. You can find Susana at her website, at Instagram; on Threads; and on Substack. Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Susana went after the show to explore the question What Would Octavia Do? in our present moment. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB’s JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. KSR, Stan to his friends, brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civilization is very bad. And ignoring it…is not going to work.” Mentioned in this episode: Pact for the Future COP 26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference) COP 30 (where KSR will be a UN rep….) Planetary boundaries J. Rockstrom (et. al.) Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Paris Agreement Don’t Look Up Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) Listen and Read. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.