All posts tagged: Fiction

If the US Collapses Soon, Don’t Blame Emily St. John Mandel

If the US Collapses Soon, Don’t Blame Emily St. John Mandel

Published by skeptic

Yeah, you’re from Canada too. I think a lot about, what if I had just stayed in Calgary? Yeah. Canada is a little more chill. It is a little more chill. See, now here we are, both extremely un-chill people in New York City. Yes, thriving. Living our best lives. Extremely stressful lives, but here we are. Ari and Ibari, they grow up in different versions of a country. They are so profoundly shaped by that country. I saw Ari as somebody who’s got this character flaw where she’s fundamentally drawn toward crime. Maybe that’s not even a flaw. Maybe it’s just an interest, because there’s a version of the world where she does the obvious thing and becomes a criminal, but there is another version of the world where she channels that into becoming the police. It was interesting to me to think about that, the way we might be drawn in one direction or another depending on the environment we’re raised in. I almost hate to ask this, because both versions of the …

‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction

‘I Like My Big Rat Wife’: Meet the People Using Chatbots to Write Custom Fiction

Published by skeptic

When Petra Ferraz de Novaes isn’t at work, she’s probably lost in a fantasy crafted with the help of artificial intelligence. Novaes, a 36-year-old software engineer from Brazil, has always loved storytelling. But making every little decision that goes into it—from style and syntax to character development—felt impossible. So in 2024 she asked an AI model to bring one of her ideas to life. Novaes was delighted by the eccentric, sometimes wayward interpretations of her prompts, which carried the narrative in unexpected directions. “What fascinates me is the unpredictability,” Novaes tells WIRED. “People say that AI hallucinates a lot. But in this case, it’s probably what you want.” These days, Novaes spends hours at a time building stories with AI, using a program called SillyTavern to run open-source models on her computer. She sketches out a concept—an elven warrior battles the queen of the Amazons and seizes her throne, for example—and watches the model fill in the gaps. In a single session, Novaes switches between multiple fantasy worlds. Some are hers, and others she borrows—she …

Emily St John Mandel: ‘When half the electorate disagrees on basic reality, how do you come back from that?’ | Fiction

Emily St John Mandel: ‘When half the electorate disagrees on basic reality, how do you come back from that?’ | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

When Emily St John Mandel was a child she had a dream that would stay with her for decades. It was a nightmare in which “I was trying to find my dad in a crowd, and there were other people who looked like him but weren’t him”, she says. “It just kind of struck my imagination.” Forty-ish years later, Mandel’s seventh novel, Exit Party, opens with a gathering in Los Angeles, 2031, where bizarre things happen. Doubles of some guests appear. Someone else disappears altogether. The novel then alternates between two potential future Americas, one riven by the chaos of civil war, the other a surveillance state. Doppelgangers and alternative realities are having a cultural moment in our uncanny, deepfake times. Mandel says the biggest challenge western democracy faces is “the collapse of consensual reality. When you get to a situation where half the electorate disagrees on basic reality – for example, who won an election, or is Covid real? I don’t know how you come back from that.” On a more personal level, she …

A Thought Without Collision by Adrian Duncan review – a brilliant interrogation of philosophy and wonder | Fiction

A Thought Without Collision by Adrian Duncan review – a brilliant interrogation of philosophy and wonder | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

For several years I ran community groups that involved reading books aloud with other adults. Sharing the experience of reading in that way made me notice how, when one or more of us was baffled by a story, this bafflement was rarely experienced without an accompanying sense of mild anger. It was so easy to make us, the readers, angry – at the characters; at the author; perhaps even at the nature of this reality on which we’d lost our grip. We were confronted with the fact that our capacity to understand the world was limited. We didn’t like that. Irish author Adrian Duncan’s fifth novel, A Thought Without Collision, takes risks with this bafflement: it relates and conveys an experience of being mystified by the universe. As it opens, in Ireland in 1923, it is becoming apparent that six-year-old Catherine has exceptional academic gifts, and that her father’s farm is failing. In the next chapter, set in 1951, Dr Josef Alois, a Tyrolean émigré academic in his mid-50s, is living in his self-built house …

Taipei Story by Rebecca F Kuang review – the torture and hilarity of learning Chinese | Fiction

Taipei Story by Rebecca F Kuang review – the torture and hilarity of learning Chinese | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

What is Taiwan? A former Japanese colony? A centre of the semiconductor industry? A democracy overseen by American imperialism? China’s next military target? An island of Austronesian Indigenous tribes? Is Taipei a cultural emblem of Taiwan, or just another booming global capital out of touch with the rest of the country? What stories will Lily Chen, an American Chinese student at Yale and Rebecca F Kuang’s funny and deadpan protagonist in Taipei Story, discover in this melting pot while spending 10 weeks learning Mandarin? A prolific maverick with rare satirical wit, Kuang has built a career debunking authoritative institutions. Babel (2022) highlights the prejudices of the British empire through a fantastical Oxford translation institute; Yellowface (2023) transplants a heist thriller into the dark heart of American publishing; Katabasis (2025), a journey into the underworld, gives the academic inferno at Cambridge a new lease of death. Centring on a tough Mandarin language school, Taipei Story explores the torture, hilarity and pretension of learning a second language, but here Kuang also offers a heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family wounds. …

The Newer World by Sebastian Barry review – a near-miracle of storytelling | Fiction

The Newer World by Sebastian Barry review – a near-miracle of storytelling | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

But is not the story as good as the truth?” asks Tennyson Bouguereau, the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s The Newer World. Tennyson, a formerly enslaved man in post-civil war America, recounts his life story in ways that call to mind the age-old debate about whether it’s better to get our history from novelists or historians. While historians might argue that there is no contest, the question hints knowingly at the novelist’s counter-argument. It sent me searching for a line from Barry’s 2008 Costa-award winning novel, The Secret Scripture, in which the narrator describes history as “a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth”. In her Reith Lectures, Hilary Mantel suggested that history is “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it”, but I tend to think of it as more of a butterfly net. Historians chase after and capture the things they deem significant. They leave things out, often deliberately. Barry’s entire body of work is a prime example of fiction’s …

The Golden Hours by Louisa Young review – this continuation of the Cazalet Chronicles is a total delight | Fiction

The Golden Hours by Louisa Young review – this continuation of the Cazalet Chronicles is a total delight | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

Elizabeth Jane Howard’s beloved family saga the Cazalet Chronicles spans three decades in the life of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family. The first four books, written in the 1990s, run from a bucolic prewar 1937 to a bruising 1947, while the fifth, 2013’s All Change, skips ahead, sitting lonely in 1956. The books are exquisite doll’s houses of feeling and object: both period detail and eternal emotion are rendered precisely and vigorously in Howard’s lovely prose. “Panoramic, expansive, intriguing as social history and generous in their storytelling,” Hilary Mantel wrote in the Guardian. The enormous cast of characters – four late-Victorian siblings, their parents, their children and partners and ex-partners and servants and friends and lovers and enemies and cars and houses – sprawl deliciously over the years. The family fortunes rise and fall. Marriages fail; deaths occur; babies are born; people fall in love. Things change; things stay the same. Written a decade after the death of the original author, The Golden Hours by Louisa Young adds a sixth to this quintet. As with all …

Horror and History in September New Historical Fiction

Horror and History in September New Historical Fiction

Published by Jenni Sidey

We’re clearly getting closer to spooky season by the day, because the amount of horror infiltrating new historical fiction releases keeps increasing exponentially. Last month, there were no historical horror books. For September, half of the featured books have a horror tilt. At this rate, there will be nothing but historical horror by October. I may be exaggerating a little here, but it’s true that this kind of increase in horror across all genres is usually the trend this time of year. But even if historical horror isn’t your preferred reading genre, the other new historical fiction books coming out feature all the intrigue, spies, and stories based on real life you could want on offer. That leaves a little something for everybody. The Eye of Goliath by Diego Muzzio, translated by Rahul Bery (September 1, 2026) In this reimagining of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde set in 1920s Scotland, a psychiatrist who takes on the patients no one else will treat finally meets his match. When David Bradley is brought to Dr. Edward Pierce …

The Bridge by Colm Tóibín review – betrayal and survival in the High Pyrenees | Fiction

The Bridge by Colm Tóibín review – betrayal and survival in the High Pyrenees | Fiction

Published by Sam Flores

Twenty years ago, Colm Tóibín published a steadily desolating novella set in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees. A woman walks out of her house and her life, starts along the mountain road and disappears in the snow. Her son Miquel, failing to find her body, waits through the dark months for the thaw. A Long Winter, which appeared in a standalone volume and then as the final story in the 2006 collection Mothers and Sons, followed Miquel through dramatically extreme circumstances and patient endurance. It was told with the most restrained prose ever likely to be employed for a son’s view of vultures circling a corpse. Now, in The Bridge, a single year has passed in Miquel’s life and he is eking out an existence with his hurtful, unyielding father. The sheep are grazing their high summer pastures; a side hustle smuggling contraband brings in a little much-needed cash. In the bare conditions of the lonely farm, any warmth of feeling is a kind of contraband smuggled in by night; love between men is doubly …

How Musk, Thiel, and Altman Misread Science Fiction

How Musk, Thiel, and Altman Misread Science Fiction

Published by Daniella Wilson

After reading Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one. I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman. Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it. As young people, the future billionaires were spending hours (under their covers with flashlights, I imagine) consuming stories about killer robots or Mars colonies. What they seemed not to get—maybe couldn’t get—was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away. These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool. They grew up to become ruthless entrepreneurs, but their surface enchantment stayed with them. It helped shape their desires. In 2009, Thiel, by then a man in early middle age, directed his venture-capital fund to focus on …