Spectology: The Science Fiction Book Club Podcast

Sometimes a book comes along that is both so unlike anything that came before it, but also so vital & perfectly voiced that once reading it, it's impossible to imagine a world where that book hasn't always existed. Nino Cipri's novella Finna (bookshop or ebook) is one such book. 

It's a story about life under late capitalism, about that eerie feeling you get whenever you get lost in one of those large Swedish furniture stores, about navigating awkward post-breakup feelings, and about labor. 

Bee interviews Nino about the book, their writing process, and labor organizing. It's a wonderful conversation, and I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have.

* Nino's twitter: https://twitter.com/ninocipri

* Nino's newsletter, Cool Story, Bro

* And their website: https://ninocipri.com 

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Make sure to follow Bee at their twitter & patreon.

As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast if we talk about your comment. 

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

To find links to all the books we've read, check us out on Bookshop.

Many thanks to Dubby J our music.

For our fourth Digital Book Tour episode, Adrian is joined by Serje Jones, whose new book The Fortress (https://bookshop.org/a/1159/9781645660026) has been published by our friends at Erewhon books. 

Serje & Adrian discuss restorative justice, writing trans-inclusive feminist science fiction, and feeling emotions in the body instead of in the mind. She also performs two readings from the book. 

As a personal asside, I think this is the best novel I've read so far this year, and I really hope folks enjoy this episode & pick up the book. It's a startling, difficult, and radical look at another possible world. 

Description from Erewhon:  

Jonathon Bridge has a corner office in a top-tier software firm, tailored suits, and an impeccable pedigree. He has a fascinating wife, Adalia; a child on the way; and a string of pretty young interns as lovers on the side. He’s a man who’s going places. His world is our world: the same chaos and sprawl, haves and have-nots, men and women, skyscrapers and billboards. But it also exists alongside a vast, self-sustaining city-state called The Fortress where the indigenous inhabitants—the Vaik, a society run and populated exclusively by women—live in isolation.

When Adalia discovers his indiscretions and the ugly sexual violence pervading his firm, she agrees to continue their fractured marriage only on the condition that Jonathan voluntarily offers himself to The Fortress as a supplicant and stay there for a year. Jonathon’s arrival at The Fortress begins with a recitation of the conditions of his stay: He is forbidden to ask questions, to raise his hand in anger, and to refuse sex.

Jonathon is utterly unprepared for what will happen to him over the course of the year—not only to his body, but to his mind and his heart. This absorbing, confronting, and moving novel asks questions about consent, power, love, and fulfillment. It asks what it takes for a man to change, and whether change is possible without a radical reversal of the conditions that seem normal.

Content notice: The Fortress contains references to objectification of and violence against women, pedophilia, sexual assault, submission, and toxic masculinity.  

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Make sure to follow Bee at their twitter & patreon. (They didn't do this interview, but have several already recorded & others in the making.)

As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment. 

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

To find links to all the books we've read, check us out on Bookshop.

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Hey all, a few things: 1. This is really late. Sorry about that! It's because of: 2. The audio quality is really bad. Matt's computer essentially crashed during recording, so we had to use the back-up recording which was also screwed up by the whole situation. So it's bad, and I've done my best to make it listenable.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode were we talk about Zen Cho's The True Queen. It's a wonderful little book about sisterhood, magical academies, scary fairies, and issues of race & gender in Regency era England.

Please enjoy the episode! We'll be taking June off of more books to publish a few bonus episodes & book tour episodes, and then be back with a new book in July.

Oh and also check out Gin Jenny on twitter, the Reading the End blog, podcast, & patreon. Really please do follow them & listen to the podcast, it's the best general book pod around.  

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

To find links to all the books we've read, check us out on Bookshop.

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.