Six Books with Annalee Newitz

Today, Annalee Newitz tells us about their Six Books

Annalee Newitz (they/them) writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the USA Today best-selling author of the novella Automatic Noodle, the books Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, and the novels The Terraformers (a Nebula Award finalist), The Future of Another Timeline (winner of the Sidewise Award), and Autonomous (winner of a Lambda Literary Award). As a science journalist, they are a writer for The New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. They are also the co-host of the three-time Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Sogdian Painting, by Guitty Azarpay. Azarpay was one of the world’s leading experts on Sogdian culture, which once ruled the silk roads and is now mostly forgotten in the west. Her book is an incredible collection of images and sketches of murals found in what remains of Sogdiana in Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. The Sogdians dominated silk road trade in the 5th-8th centuries CE, and their culture reflected the places they traveled; it was a hybrid of Iranian, Chinese, Turkish, and even a little European. You can see that reflected in their art. A painting might include a Zoroastrian story about the warrior Rustan next to a story about the goose who laid the golden egg. Or a Buddha reclining next to a Zoroastrian fire temple.

Sadly a lot of Sogdian cities and art have been lost or are not yet excavated, even though Sogdians were critical to global trade for hundreds of years. I just got back from a trip to Central Asia, where I visited a lot of Sogdian archaeological sites for a nonfiction book I’m writing on the ancient history of parties and celebrations. The Sogdians, being merchants who traveled far and wide, were excellent at throwing parties. Some of their paintings appear to include directions for playing drinking games. Azarpay’s book is basically the definitive guide to Sogdian paintings, with careful explanations of the myths and stories contained in them.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I can’t stop gushing about Mahmud El Sayed’s novel The Republic of Memory, which is an Arabfuturist story of a generation ship that goes through multiple revolutions—including one that purged all the AI embedded in people’s brains. We see a new revolution brewing through the eyes of several characters: a sweet Arab translator who just wants to marry his Japanese girlfriend, even though his family disapproves; a hotheaded revolutionary who wants to overthrow the ship’s conservative leadership; and a dangerous cyber-soldier who has been ripped out of cryosleep to solve a crime.

While many generations live and die on the ship, they are also carrying a massive number of OG people from Earth in cryosleep—which means that intergenerational rifts are very deep indeed. The characters are nuanced and sympathetic; the worldbuilding is impeccable; and the politics are never simple. El Sayed works as a translator, and he invented an entire multilingual cant for the younger generations on the ship, which is really next level worldbuilding. Best of all, it’s the first in a trilogy. I am definitely going to follow this ship all the way to its destination.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to reread?

I love this question, because I always feel so much pressure to read the NEXT thing, and rarely get a chance to go back and reread my faves. I’ve really been wanting to reread Octavia Butler’s Patternist books, because I haven’t read them in at least twenty years, and they made a huge impression on me. They’re all interconnected, though not strictly in a series, and tell the multi-millennia story of how humanity evolves into several different species—thanks in part to alien viruses and powerful, immortal mutants who have been secretly conducting a human-mutant breeding program for thousands of years.

What I love about Butler is that when you summarize her work it sounds like pure adventure, but as soon as you dig into it you realize how deeply political and unapologetically complex it is. Mutants who have been oppressed, living in the streets and committed to insane asylums, rise up to conquer Los Angeles. And then they have to grapple with the ethics of becoming the manipulators and mind-controllers of people who once did the same to them. Humans who pride themselves on their rationality struggle when alien viruses turns them into wolf-like creatures who go into heat and become feral. I hope I’m remembering all that right. This is why I need to reread these books.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?

I’m going to cheat a little bit and talk about a whole genre. So I was in love with science fiction when I was young, and read pretty much every scifi book in our local library. But my parents were both English teachers, and they looked down on scifi as “kid stuff”—when I turned 15 they started worrying aloud that I was somehow stunted because I was still reading Robert Silverberg and John Varley when I should have been reading grown-up literature by William Faulkner and Jane Austen. I’m ashamed to say that their campaign worked, and I gave up scifi for a long time. It wasn’t so bad: I read tons of beautiful literature; I became obsessed with Isaac Singer, Natsume Soseki, E.M. Forster, and Maya Angelou, among many other writers.

But then, once I was in graduate school getting a Ph.D. in English, I stopped feeling anxious about whether I was intellectually “stunted.” I got heavily into Star Trek: The Next Generation. And I started reading science fiction again. It started with Octavia Butler, and then snowballed into William Gibson, Ken MacLeod, Joanna Russ… and pretty much never stopped. I am so glad I found my way back.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

I think a lot about The Mouse and His Child, by Russell Hoban. I read it when I was about 8 years old, and I’m pretty sure that many of my own novels are still circling around ideas that book implanted in me. It’s about two mechanical dancing mice—a “father” and “child”—who are attached at the hands. When they get thrown away, they go on an existential adventure to figure out who they are. It’s full of metaphors about growing up—the mice eventually pry their hands apart—but also deals with who counts as a person, and what it means to really know yourself. There are some seriously weird, philosophical moments in the book. It was made into an animated movie, but I remember as a kid insisting that I would NOT be seeing it because no movie could possibly match the experience of the book. (On the other hand, his adult novel Turtle Diary was adapted into a movie written by Harold Pinter, and it is devastatingly great.)

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is called A Wall Is Also a Road, and it’s awesome because I was able to fulfill two personal dreams: to write accurately about the life of a sex worker in the Roman Empire, and to explore a romance between a human and a giant space amoeba with lots of tentacles. Also, it’s about trying to survive graduate school. Sapphic tentacle academia in ancient Pompeii. That’s a subgenre, right?

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with Ale Presser and K.B. Spangler

There are two of us for this Six Books Interview!

Artist and co-creator Ale Presser is a very tired Brazilian mom who lives in Portugal with her husband and son. She lives and breathes comics. According to K.B., she’s a border collie who has to be working on comics every hour of the day or she’ll start to eat the couch.

Author and co-creator K.B. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband and two completely awful dogs. She never stops writing novels, comics, and short stories. To hear Ale tell it, if left unattended, she’ll wander off and start another major writing project.

1. What book are you currently reading?

To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose, sequel to To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. I’m about a hundred pages in, and it’s got the same tone and pacing as the first book, so I’m really enjoying it. It’s one of those stories that operates on multiple levels, which I adore: the first level are the obvious challenges of the indigenous main character who is forced to operate in a white-dominated society; the second level are all of these baby living fusion engines just running around being adorable, with all the subtle implications of what it might mean that dragons can change physical matter at the elemental level; the third level is the folklore surrounding dragons and how each extremely different society claims they were saved from catastrophic climate crisis through forging bonds with these creatures. Blackgoose is building to something and I’m eager to learn how these themes are resolved.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

This Machine Kills Billionaires by T.R. Napper. It’s a cyberpunk short story collection and Napper writes dark and hard, so basically it’ll be like consuming a little slice of fury whenever I’m in the mood for delicious hate cake.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I really love rereading The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik. It’s another one of those multiple-level stories where I find something new each time I read it. There are the monsters and the capitalism metaphor, of course, but on my last reread I realized that the man character mentions many times that the monsters will go after non-magical humans once they’ve eaten all of the tasty magic-enriched stuff. So if you extend the metaphor a little, nobody is safe from the harms caused by capitalism even if they can’t participate in it themselves. Plus you get phrases like “all the sense of an unvarnished deck chair” and, I mean, never. Not on my best day.

4. Is there a book that you love and wish that you yourself had written?

Watership Down, obvs.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

Same answer. Those bunnies, man. How do you do that with bunnies? Fiver is constantly shivering in my head somewhere…you know, I should probably reread that book, too.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

Well! That would be SideQuested, the first collected graphic novel of our webcomic of the same name. Here’s the cover copy:

Magic makes the world go round, but no one in Charlie Goldskin’s world knows precisely where magic comes from. This isn’t Charlie’s problem. She’s the adopted daughter of a woodcarver and is training to be a librarian. It’ll be a quiet life, but that’s fine with Charlie, as magic is summoned through conflict and she would like to avoid that, thank you very much!

Then her birth father shows up to take her from her village and bring her to the king’s court.

Prince Leopold is gifted in the noble arts of diplomacy and combat, but he’s never met anyone like Charlie. Falling in love with her wouldn’t be an issue, except he’s already engaged, and his fiancée is the daughter of a very powerful evil witch. Charlie, panicking, decides to break the news to Princess Robin...but then she finds love at first sight, too. To resolve this love triangle, the teens are sent on a quest to discover the source of magic! So much for Charlie’s plans for a quiet life...

I’m the author, and Ale Presser is the artist. Actually she’s the primary creator: she tells me what she wants to see in the story, and I slam words and plots into place, and then she illustrates my scripts. Ale is very firm about what I can and cannot do—she won’t let me kill off anyone!—and we’re both heavily influenced by Ranma ½ and other slapstick anime romcoms, so the story is constantly full steam ahead and beware of random giant mallets. Also, magical cults seeking to steal your life’s essence for their own nefarious purposes.

But the real joy is in the characters and how they interact. For example, Princess Robin and her mother, the all-powerful witch-queen Boopsie, know each other so well that it’s a joy to write their interactions. And they’re both very clever people so they’re constantly pushing each other’s buttons. Stack these characters with Ale’s amazing and expressive art, and it’s a wildly fun ride!

Thank you! 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with Jordan Kurella

Jordan Kurella is a trans and disabled author who has lived all over the world (including Moscow and Manhattan). In his past lives, he was a photographer, radio DJ, and social worker. His work has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Sturgeon Award, and the LA Times Book Prize. He is the author of the fantasy novella, I Never Liked You Anyway, the short story collection, When I Was Lost, and the climate fiction novella, The Death of Mountains. Jordan lives in limbo with his perfect dog and practical cat.

Today he tells us about his six books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Right now I’m doing a re-read of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones as I am answering these questions a day or two before I’m due at the L.A. Times Book Festival. I’m on a panel with Stephen Graham Jones and Catronia Ward. I have Ward’s book ready to read on the train to Los Angeles. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of my favorite horror books I’ve read in a very long time, but then again, I’m an enormous fan of Dracula by Bram Stoker (probably read that four times). The book is paced and constructed similarly (but not samely) to Dracula but with more revenge, more justice, and more skill in voice (in my opinion). Jones does an absolutely incredible job in the narrative voice differences between Etsy, Good Stab, and the Pastor. This is the kind of thing I just gobble up. I’m about a third of the way through my re-read, and picking up on clues I dropped the first time.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

This was originally going to be a very difficult question to answer, as my two big books I was anticipating were Year of the Mer by L.D. Lewis and Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffman. But Year of the Mer is already out, so! This makes answering this question far easier (get Year of the Mer at your favorite indie bookstore). As Ignore All Previous Instructions is due out in May, I’ll talk about that one. This book is an incredible rocket-ride of spacefaring adventure and romance with the kind of drama that I don’t usually see in science fiction—by which I mean relationship/romantic drama—and that kinda messy stuff is totally my jam. I love fictional relationships that mimic soap opera levels of mess, and Ignore All Previous Instructions has that with trans characters, neurodivergence, space travel, and a total and scathing takedown of LLMs. Hoffman is an incredible writer, and I’ve been a fan of their work for ages. This book is my favorite of theirs so far.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I always want to re-read The Mountain and the Sea by Ray Nayler. This is my answer every time. When I’m in-between books, I see it on my shelf and want to read it again. Had the fortune of talking to Ray about this at the 2025 Seattle Worldcon, and he said that he wrote that in the hopes that folks would find it that way—like their favorite Pixies album—but to me, The Mountain and the Sea is itself about language and communication and the problems and benefits of it. So re-reading it again and again (I’ve read it twice) makes me understand the book on a deeper and deeper level, like listening or replaying a conversation in my head might do. See where I erred, or where maybe someone wasn’t being completely on the up and up. It also makes me a better writer, I think? Re-reading something that I love so completely? Because I can pick it apart and get to the makings of why it works so well.

4. A book that you love and wish you yourself had written?

No. 

I don’t get jealous or envious about other authors’ work, and when someone else writes a book concept that was close to something I was thinking of, my immediate thought is, “Oh thank gosh, now I can put that idea aside.” And then I read their book to see how much better they did it than me, and then sit back and enjoy it. Authors are all unique and bring their own life experiences to the page. Ideas might be chaff, but every idea is built upon the backbone of experience. To get to the question? The closest I got to this was Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera, which thank gosh he wrote that. Chandrasekera wrote Rakesfall as a far better book than I could write, and executed the nascent idea I’d been playing over in my head so much better and more masterfully than I ever could do. Which is cool! How can I be upset, now I get to read it! I just love reading, and I love reading a lot of things. So when I come across something that is similar to something I want to write? I am just super happy go along for the ride.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

This is a complete toss-up between D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths and The Stranger by Chris Van Allsberg. Each of these books I was given by my parents when I was around nine or ten years old, and I wore the copies out so much that the covers fell out and pages fell out. I still have the originals I was given. But I’m going to talk about The Stranger. This book is not one of Allsberg’s more famous works, it’s about Jack Frost, who gets hit by a farmer’s car, and is brought into the farmer’s home to recover from amnesia. Like much of Allsberg’s work, the illustrations are phenomenal, and there’s a mystery to be solved. When the seasons don’t change, and the harvest doesn’t come, Jack Frost suddenly regains his memory, and winter arrives. I’m getting chills just typing this. It made me seek out and have curiosity about more things. Books, nature, and beauty in the world around me.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

The last book I had published is called The Death of Mountains and it came out last year (March 2025). It features Plundered Mountain, who is a middling hill of the Appalachians who does not want to die. When she is visited by the Death of Mountains who has come to usher her along? Plundered Mountain bargains for her life through the trading of stories back and forth over the course of one night, but it becomes more involved than that, as stories always tend to do. Told in three points of view in novella length, this book was a fun thing to write, an experiment in how weird can I go? There’s a book called Before the Feast by Saša Stanišić translated by Anthea Bell. I read it about six years ago, and in it, there’s a town that speaks in a first person plural. Reading this book changed my entire perspective on how a book could be told. I could not have written The Death of Mountains without Before the Feast. But I’m getting lost in my answer: Death of Mountains, the character, is terrible at his job, while Plundered Mountain is exceedingly good (and stubborn) at being a mountain. The two clash in the kindest and gentlest of ways as they tell stories and ask questions over the nature of permanence, what is life, what is joy, and how there is no life without a little suffering. I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope others enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thank you Jordan!

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POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Six Books with Jeremy Szal

Jeremy Szal was born in 1995 and was raised by wild dingoes, which should explain a lot. He writes epic fantasy and dark space opera of a character-driven, morally grey nature. His main series is the Common trilogy from Gollancz/Hachette, which includes Stormblood, Blindspace, and Wolfskin, about a drug harvested from alien DNA that makes users permanently addicted to adrenaline and aggression. He’s the author of over fifty short stories, translated into fifteen languages, many of which appear in his short fiction collection Broken Stars. He was the editor for the Hugo-winning StarShipSofa until 2020 and has a BA in Film Studies and Creative Writing from UNSW. He carves out a living in Sydney, Australia with his family, where he loves watching weird movies, eating Japanese food, exploring cities, learning languages, cold weather and dark humour. Find him at https://jeremyszal.substack.com/ or @JeremySzal

Today he tells us about his Six Books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I'm currently reading The Strength of the Few by James Islington (a fellow Aussie!). It's engrossing, dark, twisty, and deeply intricate. I know that the puzzle pieces will inevitably fall into place soon, and now I'm just along for the ride, waiting for the penny to drop, while dreading what is coming.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

Red God by Pierce Brown. I first discovered Red Rising when I was still a teenager, back in 2015. I don't want the story to end, but end it must, as all stories do.

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to reread?

Not a book, but the manga series Beastars by Paru Itagaki. I discovered the series just before COVID hit, and so many rainy weekends were spent cooped up on the couch, exploring this world of animal protagonists. The writing is rough around the edges, but the characters and story are so well executed, and the art is truly spectacular. I'd read the whole series again just for the artwork. Maybe I will.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about—either positively or negatively?

I usually wouldn't do this, because I try to never speak ill of my literary brothers and sisters, or their books, but I've spoken with the author about this, so I'll make an exception: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio. When I first read it, I thought it long-winded, melodramatic, dull and too stuffy and full of purple prose for its own good. And make no mistake, the book is rough, as all debut novels are, including my own. But I heard that the series got better with each installment, so I gave Empire another read. I learned to appreciate the voice and style, found solace in the flowery language that helped to build this great galactic world brick by brick. The third novel, Demon in White, almost had me light-headed with just how epic and awesome it all was towards the end. If I allowed my hasty first impression to get in the way, I'd have deprived myself of one of the best SF epics in modern publishing.

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Red Rising by Pierce Brown. The entire series has been a part of my life for a long time, and has shaped me and my writing in a multitude of ways—something about a lonely, broken man, desperately seeking friendship and a home and a place where he belongs, resonated so strongly with me in my late teens, when I was seeing the end of university approaching and knew that I'd soon be ejected out into a new world to fend for myself. Although the world is one of limitless horrors and violence, it is also one of nobility and bravery, interspersed with epic and traumatic moments. I care deeply for Darrow and his cast of feral characters, and I know that I'll always have a home with them, whenever I flip open the pages again.

6. And speaking of that, what's *your* latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is Wolfskin! It's the third book in the Common series, where the DNA of an extinct alien race is turned into a drug, making users permanently addicted to adrenaline and violence. The story is centred on Vakov Fukasawa, the protagonist, and his younger brother Artyom, as they're embroiled on opposite sides of a conflict that starts off as a drug war, and escalates into a grand galactic war, where the Shenoi—the source of the stormtech—prove to be not quite as extinct as everyone believed.

Wolfskin is awesome (although I could be biased) because I've finally been able to explore a bunch of the themes and plotlines that have been gathering speed since the first book. Vakov and Artyom have (mostly) healed their relationship and are now locked in and fighting side by side against the enemies that want to see them both dead. There's no secret as to who they are fighting—the Shenoi are not friendly, and here we get to see them in their full, grotesque, gory glory. And I think Wolfskin is the book where all the characters step up and truly set out on their own path, reach their full potential. It has always been my dream to write a fully-fleshed out space opera, on a scale similar to that of Star Wars, with tons of factions and aliens and ships and superweapons, and in Wolfskin I was given the chance to do just that.

Of course, I've also tried my damnest to keep things centred on character as well, where Vakov and his relationship—both with his friends, family, and his own body, take centre stage, and I think I've achieved that. I had to make some hard decisions in this installment, with how each character would end up, but I do think that I've ended it the way it demanded to be ended. The way it needed to be.

And now, I'm just extremely happy for it to soon be out in the world.

Thank you, Jeremy!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with R.J. Barker

R.J. Barker is a critically acclaimed and award-winning author of fantasy fiction. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel for his fourth novel, The Bone Ships, and his debut trilogy The Wounded Kingdom was nominated for the David Gemmel Award, the Kitschie Golden Tentacle, the Compton Crook, and the BFS Best Debut and Best Novel awards. R.J. lives in Leeds with his wife, son, and a collection of questionable taxidermy, odd art, scary music, and more books than they have room for.

Today he tells us about his six books:

1. What book are you currently reading?

I am currently reading Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which is the fourth if his ‘Children of…’ books. I am quite a slow reader now so I am not a long way into it but it is just wonderful so far. I think Adrian is probably one of the best writers working in SFF right now. The breadth of his imagination is extraordinary, as is how quickly he manages to work which should probably be illegal (I have tried writing to my local Member of Parliament about this but they were strangely uninterested.) I love the way that he makes everything interlock and how work often calls back on itself and the depth of his creations is just wonderful. You can tell he’s done the work, which is always quite impressive to me as I try to do very little work.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

This was a really hard question for me as I am a very live in the moment person I don’t tend to be thinking about what’s coming or what has gone by much. I’m always too busy enjoying what I am doing now and writing is such a precarious occupation I think it’s often best not to think too much about the future. So I don’t. However, because of this question I found out that James Lee Burke released a new Dave Robicheaux book on the 12^th of February so now I know about that I am looking forward to it immensely. His writing is absolutely beautiful and the way he balances a sense of  impending violence and (often but not always) very subtle supernatural themes with the nature and environment of the deep south is incredible. The book is called The Hadacol Boogie. I have no idea what a Hadacol is but I am looking forward to finding out.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

Not really. Life is way too short to re-read things (with one exception but we’ll get to that below) and I’m always in search of something new. I don’t really like nostalgia and I think, for me anyway, every type of art I’ve consumed has its enjoyment tied to a place and a situation that I can never go back to. And wouldn’t want to really, so often going back to things I’ve loved is just an exercise in disappointment. I will never reclaim the sense of awe in the new I had when I first read Iain M Banks Culture books. Or find again the joy of C.J. Cherryh’s Morgaine cycle revealing to me what was really going on. So instead I want to find new things that will wow me in new ways.

4. A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

There are so many but RECENTLY that is Pagans by James Alastair Henry. It’s a police procedural set in a modern day England where Christianity never happened in the same way it did in ours. (I don’t think it’s ever underlined why but it doesn’t seem the Roman Empire never happened either). It’s an incredible book, not just because I love a crime novel, but the world just works. It’s a great bit of creation and feels entirely possible. The UK is very much a backwater, America never existed, and Africa and the Mughal empire of India are the main superpowers. There’s never a moment in the book where it doesn’t feel real.

But, bit of bad news if you are in the US, I don’t think you can get Pagans yet and you are really missing out. Sorry.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

Watership Down. I think some aspect of Watership Down is in everything I write and it remains the only book that I go back to and each time I find something new. Richard Adams was quite dismissive about the book, and thought it was for children but I think that just shows the author never quite knows what they are writing. On one level it is just an adventure with some rabbits for kids. But it’s also a deep and complex political allegory and a book full of lessons on how we treat each other. It’s just a wonderful thing and I love it dearly.

 6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is Mortedant’s Peril and it comes out in May of this year. It’s always hard as Brit when someone says ‘what makes this thing you did Brilliant.’ As you’re kind of first instinct is to go, 'well, it’s alright' then deflect off as we don’t do self congratulation particularly well. Having said that, I think people will love Irody and his friends. Even though Irody at first approach is not that loveable, I think readers will see past his mask to what’s within. Then there’s the world, I’ve created quite a few worlds and they are often hard to approach, and require a lot of patience in the reader where this isn’t that. The world has all the complexity I enjoy giving a place but you can more or less step straight in to Elbay. It’s a city and we understand cities, even if it is one like no other you’ve ever come across. There’s also no build up, the danger (or peril!), is there right from the start, you’re thrown right in to the murder mystery that puts Irody’s life in danger..

And it’s funny. Not in a jokes way, but in the way people are, when they hide from themselves or don’t see the truth that you, the reader, can see from your lofty position above the page. It’s just all something very enjoyable, I loved writing it, and I hope you will love reading it.

Thank you, R.J!

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POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with John Chu

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator by night. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte Awards, won the Best Short Story Hugo for "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" and won the Best Novelette Nebula for "If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You." The Subtle Art of Folding Space is his first novel.

Today he tells us about his six books.

1. What book are you currently reading?

Matching Minds with Sondheim by Barry Joseph. Stephen Sondheim, of course, is one of greatest writers of musical theater of all time. He was also a great creator of games and puzzles. This book explores this aspect of his work to give us more insight into his creative process. Also, it has some of the puzzles and games he created. As you read the book you are, in fact, also matching minds with Sondheim.

 2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed, the author who wrote The Fortunate Fall. It’s a bit lengthy, but I absolutely devoured it. The novel is unabashedly and unapologetically queer. It is an unflinching exploration of gender that takes place on a world whose native living beings have a genuinely alien lifecycle that defy our implicit categorization of living beings. ((I apologize for the awkward wording of that last sentence. I’m trying to avoid spoilers.) All of this takes place in an epically far-future milieu. There is so much to unpack with this novel and it is all fascinating.

I believe both Cameron Reed’s novel and mine have the same release date [April 7th]. Buy both!

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I don’t generally re-read books. I’m not the world’s fastest reader. Also, the day job and writing doesn’t leave much time for reading. So, I prioritize works that I haven’t read over works I have. At this point, my (virtual) to-be-read pile is so large that I don’t know whether I will ever make my way through. And yet, I keep adding to it.

That said, there are books like The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola that are so far outside my lived experience, I feel like perhaps I need to read it again before I can claim with a straight face that I have read it. In grad school, I rushed through The Book of the New Sun in my spare moments and I would love to experience those novels again at a more leisurely pace. While I’m at it, by sheer coincidence, I read A Fire Upon the Deep while I was studying network architecture. (A novel computer network is a tangential part of my PhD dissertation.) So much of that book referenced what I was also learning about and researching at that moment. It might be nice to revisit that book in a context where that is not the case.

 4.  A book that you love and wish that you yourself had written.

I read Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire and was instantly smitten. It is a gorgeously written novel and very much the novel about assimilation that I wanted to write. The book is trenchant about the effects of imperialism and the contradictions it inevitably creates. Mahit is so true to life in that she both admires the culture of the empire, seeing its value, and understands viscerally the cost of that culture. She does this through, in part, the context of language, which is a topic near and dear to my heart.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

I’m going to mention two because I can’t decide. 

The first is The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster. Malka Older, who read it recently, posted about it on social media and from that I have to conclude, sadly, that the Suck Fairy has gotten to it. Fear of this is one reason why I never revisited or passed it on to my nieces when they were the right age for it. I gave them more contemporary books. The Phantom Tollbooth, I should note, was already pretty old when I read it. So, maybe the right time to read it was when both you and the world was young enough not to know better.

That said, baby me was absolutely delighted by the sheer invention of all the places Milo visited. I ate up all the absurdity and wordplay. 

That brings me to the second book, The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. It’s another book that I’m afraid to revisit, lest I find out the Suck Fairy has gotten to that, too. This book almost sparked the love mysteries and sheer wordplay that I still have today. Again, tiny me eeked and gasped at every revelation. Tiny me reveled in the clever way Ellen Raskin manipulated words. 

There is a Chinese translation. One day, I may have to get my hands on it just to see how the translators navigated some potentially thorny issues as the wordplay is very much part of the mystery. (Again, I’m being vague so as to avoid spoilers for a novel that’s nearly 50 years old.) Maybe I should have mentioned this as a novel that I’m itching to re-read. (It depends on whether you call reading it in a different language re-reading.)

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest (read: first) book is called The Subtle Art of Folding Space and it comes out on April 7th from Tor Books. To reference question 4b, this is, to some extent, the book about assimilation that I did write. Right off the bat, the main character, Ellie, is accused of being insufficiently Taiwanese by her sister and, throughout the book, Ellie finds herself navigating the expectations of not just her family but multiple cultures. 

That, however, is the context for a story about the sometimes thankless job of making sure the world keeps working. Ellie is sent off by her sister Chris to the skunkworks, the machinery that generates the physics of the university, to replace a worn part. Chris can’t do it as she insist on being the one and only person to take care of their comatose mother. However, her cousin Daniel shows her that physics has been deliberately modified to keep her mother alive. It’s also causing spurious errors all over the universe. Right at the start, she is forced to make a decision no one should ever be forced to make: the life of her mother or the proper functioning of the universe.

The novel deals with family, assimilation, and the responsibility to make the world work, but it’s also a lot fun. It has both a secret cabal that threatens to topple the order of the universe and a man who makes food appear out of thin air on command. It has both a library with too many physical dimensions and a librarian who is a giant tree trunk mounted on top of a giant spider. It encompasses both the messy aftermath of a death and a car that spontaneously turns into a rhinoceros. I hope the novel captures the absurdity and joy of life and I hope people have as much fun reading it as I have writing it.

Thank you!

Thank YOU, John. 

You can also read a review of The Subtle Art of Folding Space here.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

6 Books with Aubrey Sitterson

Aubrey Sitterson is a comic book man. Based in Los Angeles, he is recognized for his ferociously idiosyncratic creator-owned work, blending literary aspirations with genre exploration. His best-known works of fiction include the geopolitical space opera Free Planet, fight comic character study No One Left to Fight, and populist superhero series BEEF BROS. Additionally, he is the writer of the exhaustively researched nonfiction tome The Comic Book Story of Professional Wrestling.

Today he tells us about his Six Books

1. What book are you currently reading?

Recognizing the importance of a balanced diet, in addition to contemporary comics and other periodicals, I try to always keep a nonfiction and a historical comics read going simultaneously. Right now, the former is Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, a detailed, personality-based exploration of the 19th century military and intelligence sparring undertaken by the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. In addition to being the beginning of a dynamic that would continue through the Cold War with significant impacts today, it's also a rollicking, imperialist adventure story.

On the comics front, I'm finally reading Elfquest, which has always been an embarrassing gap in my comics knowledge; it's as wonderful as everyone says it is. Wendy Pini's control of gesture and character design are unparalleled, functioning within a newspaper and European comic strips tradition that, because of its remove from most contemporary US comics, hits like a ton of bricks today; not to mention how outrageously sensual all the character interactions are, without ever feeling salacious. Plus, like The Great Game--I'm discovering a theme--it's also a ripping adventure story.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

The Daniel Freedman anthology Stimulus. Daniel sent me a PDF of it months and months ago and I adored it, despite being keenly aware that--because we share a similar comics philosophy--reading it digitally was a pale imitation of the real thing. Working with a murderer's row of artists, all chosen for their specific talents, Daniel presents a collection of sci-fi stories that reward slow, careful reading and deliberate thought, with interlocking and recursive themes. And, as evidenced by how stoked I am to get the physical edition, it also rewards rereading.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

Dave Sim's sprawling, experimental, abrasive, and controversial Cerebus isn't just one of my favorite comics of all time, I think it's the best comic of all time and one of the best works of written English in any medium. Sim accomplished what I aspire to: A comic that achieves novelistic depth not despite the medium but through it, utilizing, dusting off and innovating formal approaches that are always tied to his overarching fixations and the work's byzantine thematic layering. I read the full thing in college and it blew the top clean off my skull; over the past few years, I've been going back through the collections and am even more impressed than I was as a younger man. After I finish this volume of Elfquest, I'm planning to tackle the acclaimed Jaka's Story volume.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about – either positively or negatively?

It took me at least three running starts, over the course of half a dozen years, to make it through Dune. Well before the movie, I knew it was something that--on paper--I should love; in addition, I wanted to love it; I wanted to be a Dune guy. Not just because of the high regard in which it was held but because it was this big, sprawling, uncompromising text, so deep and complex as to feel esoteric. But on the first few reads, I found it punishingly dry; I think it was down to two things: 1) Trying to read it like an essay that has to be fully digested as opposed to a work of art meant to wash over you, and 2) Reading it--like a fool--digitally.


Eventually, something clicked for me and I devoured all of the Frank Herbert books. While I'm still torn on my opinion of the individual volumes, I adore them all as part of a whole; it's the platonic ideal of a long-running series, reveling in the freedom to explore different approaches, settings, tones and characters, while remaining in disciplined service to the work's overarching themes, layering in depth and complexity along the way.

5 What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

My favorite author in high school was Aldous Huxley; he still ranks extremely highly. While I dug Brave New World and Island was probably my favorite, the one that stuck with me the most is Point Counterpoint. It's a stunning piece of work, with a sprawling cast generally freaking out about the convulsions of the early 20th century. The character work is flawless, with Huxley simultaneously constructing and deploying instantly relatable archetypes, such that it feels both prophetic and timeless. But the aspect I've never stopped thinking about is the interplay between the characters' lengthy conversations, the larger issues lurking around the edges, and their relationships with one another, including the romantic.

Point Counterpoint is big, messy soap opera but it's also about big, messy ideas; concepts and challenges so complex and complicated as to defy the simple explanations found in parable and direct metaphor. Instead, Huxley mirrors the complexities of these challenges--political, social, economic, and moral--with the characters' ardently held but often inconsistent worldviews. I've always aspired to create work this challenging, with this type of depth; work brave enough to admit that there aren't any simple answers to questions worth asking, with complexity and ambiguity that inspire rumination in readers.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is Free Planet, an ongoing series from the legendary Image Comics. Free Planet is space opera about what happens after the revolution is won. The Freedom Guard, a group of revolutionary heroes, is tasked with safeguarding the freedom of Lutheria from threats without and within. The problem, however, is that--just like in this great nation of ours--they all have completely different ideas about what complete freedom entails. It's informed by extensive research into real world revolutions and civil wars, with what Robert Kirkman calls "rich, intricate worldbuilding"; think "Cordwainer Smith meets Noam Chomsky" and "Sci-fi G.I. Joe defending space Venezuela" and you're partway there.

Throughout Free Planet's creation, cocreator/artist Jed Dougherty and I have aspired to utilize the comics medium to the utmost, attempting to match Huxley's depth and complexity through the use, not just of prose, but images, design, and their communication with one another on the page. It's a holistic approach to comics; rather than creating a story and breaking it into issues, panels, and pages, the book is ideated and written as an art object, built of overwhelming spreads featuring maps, graphs, charts, and infographics on top of all the sci-fi action and soap opera drama. It's not to be read quickly; it's a world you're meant to slow down and luxuriate within. And best of all? There's a full graphic novel waiting for you, with new issues landing at your local comic shop every single month.

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Thank you, Aubrey!

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.