Episode 71: Transcript
Episode: 71: Books that will get you through the winter
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, author of the upcoming young adult novel Victories Greater Than Death.
Annalee: [00:00:10] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of the upcoming science book called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:20] So today, we're going to be talking about books that will get you through this long winter, we're having. Which, you know, it’s gonna be a little bit of a rough winter, for various reasons. And, you know what’ll really help you get through that? A really nice, cozy book that you can get into bed and read. So we'll be talking about some of our all-time favorite books from like forever, as well as some recent books from 2020 that we really recommend. And just books that we feel like would be good to keep you company during the winter. Happy reading!
[00:00:50] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:17] Books are an amazing companion. They're great gifts for your friends and loved ones. And Annalee and I are actually, this year, we're getting sort of care packages made for some of our loved ones from a local bookstore, that's going to be books and a few other little things. And we highly recommend that you support your local bookstore right now. It's a really difficult time for local bookstores, they're suffering a lot of financial strain, they have a lot of high rents and low margins on their products. And the next few months are going to be really crucial to whether bookstores get to survive this mess. And so the books we're going to recommend today, we really strongly encourage you to get from your local bookstore.
Annalee: [00:02:00] Yeah, and the thing is, is that indie bookstores have been asking shoppers who are thinking about getting book presents to get them early. Don’t wait until December 10th, or 24th, or whatever the night before Christmas is. I never can remember because I'm Jewish, and I don't care. So don't buy me a Christmas book. The good time to get those gifts is now and we worked with our one of our favorite local bookstores, Dog Eared Books in San Francisco to send out care packages for us. And you can do that with other indie bookstores too. You could call them up and or email them and ask, hey, could you put together some gift packages and mail them for me. A lot of places can do that. Some places can't, but you can just ask them to pick books out they think would be really great. Bookstore recommendations are awesome. And I just really want to encourage folks who want to give presents of books to think about doing that now and think about creative ways that you can do that because it's been really fun for us figuring out what books we want to send. And it's just a good way to have happy presents arriving in the mail for your beloved friends.
[00:03:15] So we're talking about winter reading, which you and I were talking earlier, Charlie Jane about what is the difference between winter reads and summer reads? So what makes a good winter read?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:28] For me personally, in winter, it gets dark really early. It's cold. Everything's a little spooky, maybe. And if it's snowy, that's obviously, there's like this weird alien creature that's descended onto the landscape outside your window. Snow is weird. Like, you never really think about how weird snow is. But snow is really weird. Anyway, the point is, it's a time when you need comfort, you need comfort reads.
[00:03:52] In the summer, you can have your beach reads which are like your kind of I'm gonna lie on the beach and just drink a mimosa and feel all mellow and happy and stuff. But I feel like a winter read should be a comfort read. It should be a read that's not just exciting, but kind of comforting and kind of maybe a little bit sweet. Something that you can kind of snuggle inside. Something that you can lose yourself in something that has a world and characters and possibilities that just feel like you want to live there. But also, not necessarily the scariest book. Not necessarily a book where there's just like, people getting maimed on every page. I don't know, Annalee what do you think makes a great winter read?
Annalee: [00:04:31] I totally agree with all that. I think that the summer read is always, the idea is that you're in an awesome place already. You’re vacationing or something so you've already escaped and then you just want a book that will kind of inject further excitement or romance or whatever into your experience.
[00:04:51] Whereas in winter, we're thinking less about, a lot of people do go on vacation, although not this year because of the pandemic. I think that's gonna cut back on a lot of people's plans. And you want a sense of family and connectedness, I think in the winter. I think that's part of the comfort aspect of winter reads is that, I think some people probably do like a spooky winter read. But for me, I think it has to be about friends coming together or family coming together or family finding each other, I think, is always a good theme.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:26] For sure.
Annalee: [00:05:27] A book that'll end with a sense of safety, even if it has scary adventures throughout it. I think that's part of the promise of the winter read is that at the end, you'll come back and be safe in your cozy bed. Whereas a summer read, you can end that book by dumping somebody alone on a space station and leaving them to freak out because when you put that book down you're gonna still be sitting there on summer vacation. But in the winter, you don't want to hear it.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:59] And it's really true that you get lonely in the winter. Everybody gets lonely in the winter. I think even if you have loved ones around, it's a lonesome time. And it's a time when a lot of people feel a little bit sadder and so I think having reads, I think you're so right about the importance of reads that are full of friendship and community and love and fun. I think that that is a key ingredient to a good winter read, in fact. Is the feeling of community.
Annalee: [00:06:28] Also bonus if there's really good food scenes.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:31] Yeah, no, you're so right.
Annalee: [00:06:33] I just want a giant feast on an alien planet with space acorn bread and jam made from exotic berries that only grow on Venus after we've started growing berries on Venus for some reason.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:52] You know, there’s phosphine. Phosphine basically equals berries.
Annalee: [00:06:56] Right? I can just plant berries in the phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere.
[00:07:02] All right, should we talk about some books that we would recommend for this winter that came out in 2020? In the past year?
Charlie Jane: [00:07:11] Yeah. Annalee. What's a book that you loved in 2020 that you think would make a really good winter read?
Annalee: [00:07:17] My first recommendation is Rebecca Roanhorses new novel Black Sun. Which we both loved and she is starting a trilogy with this. So I want to caution readers that when you read Black Sun, it will be delightful and full of friends and fellow ninjas coming together. But it does end on kind of a cliffhanger. But she's promised the next book is coming very, very soon.
[00:07:48] It's the story of a woman with magical powers living in an alternate version of Mesoamerica. So that's a really broad term for the Americas about 1000 years ago, before Europeans came and settled, and the great civilizations of Mexico and throughout North America, and how those great civilizations produced this [unclear]. And so our magical main character is a pirate, she has been paid by a kind of mysterious nobleman to take a blind badass monk fighter guy across the sea, to the Mississippi, and to go up the Mississippi to an amazing mystical city, where they're going to tangle with giants, sentient crows, and different factions warring not just for control of this incredible city, but perhaps for the world itself.
[00:08:51] And it's really amazing. The politics are really interesting. It's full of great characters, it's got the exact thing that you want in a winter read, which is a bunch of different really awesome people coming from different places, coming together, realizing common cause and going on a literal pirate adventure up the Mississippi to a city in the clouds, which is just super cool.
[00:09:13] Okay, what's your next recommendation, or your first recommendation, but the next recommendation of the show?
Charlie Jane: [00:09:20] Yeah, I mean, another book, actually, by a friend of ours that I think we both loved in 2020 is The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall. It's a young adult book. It’s cracking, great, amazing adventure set in a world that sort of French and sort of Japanese and sort of all these different... It's a secondary world, but it has all these different influences. And it's just such a rich, fascinating world with all this like history and all these layers to it. And there's this group of pirates who are kind of evil, who have a hustle going where they pretend to be taking, nobleman and noble women as passengers, and then when they get far out enough to sea they reveal that they're actually slavers and that they're going to enslave or hold hostage the noble people.
[00:10:07] And there's one young woman who is a victim of this scam, but she befriends this young person and teaches them to read. And there's a mermaid onboard the ship. And there's like mermaids who are angry because the pirates have been messing with them. And there's a witch and there's just like, it's just so much amazing stuff. And the central relationship between the two main characters is so beautiful and so well done, and the world is so rich, and I'm so excited that there's gonna be a sequel because… it doesn't really end on a cliffhanger. I don't think.
Annalee: [00:10:36] No, it has a very satisfying ending, but it also feels at the end, like, yeah, this could this could easily be another book for sure, or a whole series, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:45] We want more of this world. I just want more of this world and we're gonna get more of it, which is amazing. But definitely an amazing sort of winter kind of comfort read is The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall.
Annalee: [00:10:55] I think what these two books have in common is both of them have sexy pirate and ocean journeys that are very swashbuckling. I would I would call both Black Sun and The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea total swashbuckling tales. And they both have really great romances in them, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:15] That's a thing that we didn’t say before about winter books, but I think when you're stuck indoors, and you can't go anywhere, and there's this weird, alien, white substance all over everything, getting to read a book about a long journey, where it's like, we're going on a journey, and we're going to all these cool places. It can be just really fun to vicariously travel somewhere.
Annalee: [00:11:38] Totally agree. Okay, so speaking of weird white substances raining everywhere. My next pick is—
Charlie Jane: [00:11:47] Okay.
Annalee: [00:11:47] N.K. Jemisin's novel The City We Became, which is also the first book in a trilogy, although it doesn't have as much of a cliffhanger ending. I feel like Black Sun, really, it's like it ends in the middle of a thing. Anyway, The City We Became, it’s already been much lauded. So I don't have much to add in terms of heaping praise on it. We all agree, it's amazing. It's basically a cosmic horror story, in which… I don't know if horror is the right term. It's kind of gothy, but it's about what the world would be like if every city had the potential to become a kind of spirit person. And not all cities can do this, the city has to achieve a certain amount of cultural importance and size and historical weight. There are a number of cities around the world, like Rio is one example that have achieved this.
[00:12:48] And New York, at the beginning of The City We Became, it's kind of being born. And it's an unusual, mystical city, because instead of one person or sort of person-slash-deity, embodying the city, it's five people, one for each of the boroughs.
[00:13:06] And so the quest of the story is for these five boroughs to come together to fight against the cosmic gentrification of New York City because there's an evil white lady, basically a Karen from another dimension, who is buying up New York City real estate, and also bringing pieces from her… She's basically a settler, so she's bringing pieces from her alternate reality into New York City. And these little pieces are like mushrooms and spores and weird shapes. It's very kind of Cthulhu-esque, where there's like weird alternate forms of geometry.
[00:13:51] And so the characters who are kind of becoming the city of New York can see this everywhere. That pieces of New York are now covered in like fungus. And of course, ordinary people like us can't see it yet. But I think the threat is there that eventually, once this gentrification from another dimension happens, we will all be, I don't know, mushroom fodder.
[00:14:12] But it's a great adventure. It's a celebration of cities as communities, which I love, because I feel like we're going through a phase culturally right now because of the pandemic where people are fleeing from cities, and they're kind of rejecting cities, and they're forgetting all the things about city life that make it great.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:31] Yeah, I just wanted to add that I never dog ear books anymore. It's a habit that I used to have when I was reviewing professionally a lot. But I dog eared so many pages in my copy of The City We Became because there were just so many funny bits and so many cool little moments that I was like, I'm gonna want to go back and look at this and like my copy of it is just dog eared up the wazoo because I was enjoying it so much and wanted to like be able to look back at some of the best bits.
Annalee: [00:14:56] On top of being kind of cosmic in scope, it's also really funny. And I think—
Charlie Jane: [00:15:01] It really is.
Annalee: [00:15:02] That N.K. Jemisin, she does have a really good sense of humor, and she does inject little bits of humor into all of her novels. But in this one, she's really kind of let her funny side show. And I think maybe that's because it's set in our world. So she's able to bring in like, pop culture references, and just snarky commentary on New York City life, and so it's really nice to hear that part of her voice as a writer. Because it's really quite effective in this story.
[00:15:33] So okay, what's your next pick?
Charlie Jane: [00:15:36] Yeah, so my next pick is another book by someone who was a guest on our podcast, which I'm realizing a bunch of the books that we're recommending are from people who were guests on our podcast. Which I think you know, just shows that we have really good taste in who we get as guests.
Annalee: [00:15:48] Yeah, exactly. It also shows that when we love books, we invite the people who write them to come on our show.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:55] Exactly. It's both. Anyway, so the next book that I wanted to recommend is the fantastic Legendborn by Tracy Deonn, who was a guest recently on our episode about Arthuriana and Arthurian lore, and all things Arthur and Camelot and Excalibur. And I mean, we already talked about that book a fair bit in that episode, but I can talk about that book all day. It is just such a fun, amazing, it's another great kind of adventure. It's got a lot of darkness in it, but it never kind of becomes what I would call a really dark upsetting book. It's a book that's basically all about different traditions and different views of history. And, different legacies.
[00:16:37] The main character, Bree, is really caught in between different kinds of legacies. And she's, I don't want to give any spoilers, but she's tangled up in this sort of Arthurian legacy, but she also has a different legacy from her African American ancestors and their root work. And it's a book that's very, much like The City We Became, it's a book that's very much grounded in the real world. It's not a secondary world, like Black Sun or The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea. It's our world and it's very much grounded in a sense of place. It takes place to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a place where I actually lived for a while, so I know it pretty well. And it was really interesting to just see this town sort of come alive in Tracy Deonn's kind of imagining. And it’s just, it’s so rich and so much going on. And every time I thought I knew what was happening in the story, something wildly different happened. And there's a really beautiful love triangle. It's just like, it's one of those books that's basically, you eat it up like candy. But then it leaves you with a lot to think about, which is one of my favorite kinds of books, I gotta say. And it's a perfect winter read, because you will just be sucked in.
Annalee: [00:17:46] Awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:46] So Annalee, what's your third recommendation from 2020.
Annalee: [00:17:49] My third and final recommendation from 2020 for the purposes of this show, not for the purposes of life, because I have a million other recommendations on top of these, is a nonfiction book by Sarah Parcak, who is an archaeologist. And the book is called Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past. And there's a lot of things that are great about this book. First of all, just the archaeology part of it. Sarah studies ancient Egypt, which is automatically already super fascinating. And she is one of the people who helped uncover a large part of the city of Tanis, which is of course made famous in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was an ancient capital of the Egyptian kingdom. People had known where it was for a long time. But what Sarah did was she used imagery taken by space vessels, mostly satellites, to look at the area around what was known of Tanis and also of many, many other sites in ancient Egypt, to see what appeared to be the outlines of the city grid.
[00:19:02] And there's a lot of different ways that she talks about in the book that you can use satellite imagery to find basically buried cities. And she's found a lot. She's found hundreds of ancient Egyptian sites this way. She's also found them in other areas like in England. She's found some henges, I think, and she's also working in South and Central America, looking for cities that haven't been found before or settlements.
[00:19:31] But she talks about the different ways that you can analyze satellite photography to look for things like how the absorption of water in the sand changes if there is a brick wall underneath it, versus if it's just a bunch of sand. There's different kinds of absorption patterns of water. If you're lucky enough to have vegetation, vegetation grows differently over top of buried structures than it does over, again, just loose soil or soil isn't burying anything. And so she has a ton of different tricks that she does. So she calls herself a space archaeologist, because the way she does her work is by looking at the Earth from space and she was a big pioneer in this field.
[00:20:14] One of the things that's fun about the book is, first, of course, learning about ancient Egypt, which she is incredibly knowledgeable. She's been working in Egypt for her entire career with local Egyptian scientists. So she kind of takes us back in different little vignettes in each chapter to kind of give us a glimpse of the daily life in ancient Egypt.
[00:20:37] But then she also talks about how hard it is to be someone who is using really cutting-edge technology in a field that's kind of an old field, like archaeology. People have been doing archaeology for a long time. She got a lot of pushback when she started saying, like, hey, let's use satellite imagery and use computers to analyze that imagery. And people would just, she said, she got nicknamed satellite girl, and not in a nice way. Like, it sounds like a good superhero name, but…
Charlie Jane: [00:21:06] t really does.
Annalee: [00:21:08] And indeed, she's claimed it as her superhero name, her Twitter handle is actually Indie from Space, because she loves Indiana Jones, but she’s like the better version of Indiana Jones.
[00:21:19] And so the thing that's great about this book is that it takes you all the way back into history, it's really fun to read. And then she ends it by talking about the future and about how the satellite and sensing technology that she uses could be used in the future to build better ecosystems, to protect ecosystems, to change society. And so it kind of ends with this vision of the future. And that's partly based on her really deep understanding of how civilizations change, not on the four-year scale of presidential elections, but on the thousand years scale of empires, like the Egyptian kingdom, which lasted for a really long time.
[00:22:03] She has just terrific insight. She's really funny. It's just a joy to read. And it makes you feel like you're going on an adventure, both in time and space. So I can't recommend it enough.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:14] Wow, that sounds amazing. And I would love to read that. And I'm fascinated by space archaeology. I think it's just so cool that we're getting this other view of of everything.
Annalee: [00:22:23] Everything.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:25] Everything.
Annalee: [00:22:25] Okay, so Charlie, what's your next pick?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:29] So my third and final recommendation from 2020 is Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. He's probably best known for his novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Interior Chinatown is his first, I think it's his first novel since then. And it is. It's very meta, and very kind of concerned with identity, and storytelling, and who gets to tell what story and who gets to be the hero of their story.
[00:22:56] Basically, it's about this group of Chinese people in a kind of fictional Chinatown, who are their real people, but they're also kind of characters on television. And they're aware that they’re characters on television. It's really hard to describe. And it's interspersed with bits of TV scripts about these people, kind of and mostly they're relegated to being like the Asian sidekick, or the kind of Asian character who walks into one scene of a police procedural. And a lot of the book is about police procedurals, and how there's a white cop and a black cop. And then there's the Asian person who kind of shows up occasionally.
Annalee: [00:23:31] And like serves dinner at a Chinese restaurant or something.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:36] Right. Or if there's like, if they have to go to Chinatown, for some reason, there's Chinese extras hanging around. And those are kind of the main characters of the book and the actual main character is a guy named Willis, who dreams of transcending the kind of normal, Asian, you know, kind of anonymous Asian guy in every scene role and becoming like kung fu guy. Because kung fu guy is the one role that Asian people can have that's better than just kind of hanging out on the side
[00:24:03] It's a very funny book, which is part of why I think it's a good winter read. It's very funny. It's very sardonic. It actually, I guess, came out in winter, early 2020. So it's a good distraction from the state of the world. But it also, again, will make you think a lot. And it'll just make you think differently about all the TV that we're all bingeing right now, as we're in the middle of a winter and a pandemic and everything.
Annalee: [00:24:27] Also, Charles Yu has been working in TV. He worked Westworld—
Charlie Jane: [00:24:31] He has.
Annalee: [00:24:31] And he's worked on a couple of other shows. And so one of the things that I think is so great about this novel is that he's speaking from experience. He's been in the writers room and these little snippets of scripts are kind of how his brain works now. He’s working in writing scripts and so that's another layer of delicious meta in the book, is, it’s just like, okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:57] It really is.
Annalee: [00:24:59] He's a TV Writer writing about TV writing.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:03] It's so true. Yeah.
Annalee: [00:25:04] That's what's great about his work, in general is he's so funny and his layers of meta, I feel like a normal person can handle three layers of meta, and the Charles Yu level is like seven layers of meta. It's like the Viennese cake of meta, basically.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:24] Yeah, I think that that’s a really good analogy. Of course, it’s making me hungry for Viennese cake.
Annalee: [00:25:31] I just wanted to talk about cake, really.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:34] Yep, now I'm craving cake and it's all your fault. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is definitely a book that only a professional television writer who's also an incredible novelist could have written. And it's just a really unique kind of treasure.
[00:25:49] So those are our six recommended books from 2020. And when we come back, we're going to talk about perennial favorites. Books that we keep coming back to.
[00:25:57] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:26:10] Alright, so now we're gonna give you some recommendations for perennial favorite books that we love. And Charlie Jane, why don’t you start us off?
Charlie Jane: [00:26:20] So one actually graphic novel that I keep coming back to is Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu, which is such a beautiful, sweet graphic novel, about a witch and a non-binary werewolf dealing with an evil plot. It's got that thing that we kind of talked about before, where it's just full of like love and community and friendship and family. And the supporting cast is just, for the most part, incredibly sweet and supportive and kind. And it's a book that really models kindness, and handles disability in a really good way, but also is just like a really friendly, comforting book that you just want to kind of curl up with and be with these characters for a while, even if you've read it a couple of times. It's just, it's that sweet and that fun.
[00:27:07] Annalee, what's your first perennial recommendation?
Annalee: [00:27:11] My first one is the novel Hild by Nicola Griffith, which is a big fat historical novel. Nicola Griffith does write a lot of science fiction, but she also loves British history. And this is the sort of retelling of the story of St. Hilda, who lived in seventh century England, right at the moment when the Anglo Saxons and other tribes were converting to Christianity.
[00:27:43] In fact, Hild, the main character, who later becomes St. Hilda, is one of the people who in real life history did a lot of this conversion of sort of pagans to Christianity. But in the book Hild, she is a young woman, and she is not yet really Christian. She's still very strongly influenced by the paganism of her youth. And she is part of an Anglo Saxon culture where women wield quite a bit of power. And this is quite accurate. And she's being trained to run the household of her royal family. And, of course, it's not sort of a royal household of the type that we would have in the modern age with like a lot of fancy shit. It's basically a farmstead with a really, really nice long house, and some really big flocks of animals and farmland. But to be powerful, she has to be helping the household to manufacture food and wool and all kinds of other stuff. And she's also learning to be a warrior, and she's also having some hot lesbian sex, because it's Nicola Griffith.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:58] Yay!
Annalee: [00:28:58] And so she's this kind of, I mean, she's almost a kind of non-binary figure. She has a kind of masculine side. She's brilliant in battle, and with a sword. She has this feminine side. And that's actually part of what the book is about, is how she's kind of coming of age in two worlds. A world that's more of a male world and a world that's more of a woman's world. She doesn't quite fit into either one.
[00:29:25] On top of all that, because Nicola Griffith is such a badass with historical research. there's just a lot of really interesting detail about what England was like, what everyday life was like for ordinary people. But also, for example, one of the sub themes in the book is the spread of literacy, and how literacy was an incredibly important technology for people who were trying to enter what eventually became kind of global culture, people who were trying to communicate with Europe, people who were trying to communicate with their spies across England, or across what would become England. And so, as Hild becomes literate, she gains power through that too. And it's basically the power of communication.
[00:30:12] So in that sense, it feels like a kind of a modern story because it's sort of that that era’s equivalent of the internet. But it's really also just a coming of age adventure and it's just perfect for curling up next to the fire or next to the heater or just under your weighted blanket, and learning about another time, and just a super badass, but realistic hero who does a little rampaging, does a little cow milking, and then does a little hot lady sex? And those are, I mean, I don't know what else you could ask for?
[00:30:50] So what's your pick, Charlie?
Charlie Jane: [00:30:52] My second pick is The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord, which is just an amazing, it’s actually hard to kind of categorize it. It's kind of a space opera romance and it's got a little bit of a Star Trek feel. It's very much like a Star Trek influenced kind of book. And Karen Lord is a Caribbean speculative fiction writer who previously had written the acclaimed book Redemption in Indigo.
[00:31:20] And The Best of All Possible Worlds is like this kind of surprisingly light hearted book, considering that it starts off with an act of genocide. Basically, this group of very rational, almost Vulcan-like people called the Sadiri, are mostly wiped out. I think their planet is destroyed. And so, basically, the surviving Sadiri have to find a way to continue their species, which means that they have to basically track down their descendants who are living on other planets, and in some cases, their descendants who have intermingled with the local population, and bring them into their culture, but also romance them. And it’s kind of like this beautifully kind of sweet and funny romance of manners and courtship, about different cultures and about who gets to be part of a culture, but also how to ensure the survival of a culture.
[00:32:12] And it's a really beautiful book that has older characters who are allowed to be romantic and to kind of fall in love and care about each other. And it just feels like a love letter to all these other kind of space opera stories like Star Trek, but also a really unique kind of unusual version of this kind of story of survival and cultural continuation, and what it means to kind of continue your species and your civilization.
[00:32:44] Annalee What's your next pick?
Annalee: [00:32:46] My next pick, is Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, who has recently been working almost exclusively in comic books and of reinventing Miles Morales and Black Bolt, and you can get those floppies. So I'd also recommend those by him. But this is a fantasy novel, it's set in a kind of a version of the Arabian Nights universe, I would say. I don't know what the name of that universe is. But it's a sort of alternate medieval Middle East. A period of great enlightenment during the Middle East, so it's a very cosmopolitan place where it's set in this big bustling city. And it's about all my favorite things. It's a group of ragtag heroes who have powers that they don't quite have control of, who are coming together. One is a shapeshifter. One has different kinds of magical powers. One is a gruff, old man who really just wants to sit at home and drink tea and hook up with his sex worker, girlfriend, and just kind of have a nice life. But he’s sucked into this adventure because an evil king is ruthlessly destroying people in the city, and is taking away their rights, and is doing terrible things like using magic to cause basically environmental racism.
[00:34:14] This is like one of my favorite details in the book. It's just full of this kind of observation. But like, the evil king uses magic to take the smell from the tannery section of town, where they're making leather and stuff and pipe that smell into the poor section of town. So it's like magical environmental racism, like I said.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:32] Oh man. That is. Dang.
Annalee: [00:34:36] The thing that's wonderful about Throne of the Crescent Moon is it has all of the swashbuckling wonder of a typical kind of Arabian Nights type story, but it's got all of this texture that feels super realistic, and that clearly is kind of in reference to the Arab Spring when it was just sort of close to the time when the book was written and a lot of other modern social movements.
[00:35:00] And it has this delightful arc. The adventure happens, friends come together, it makes you feel a renewed sense of faith in social movements, which is really much needed right now. So check out Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed.
[00:35:19] And what's your next pick, Charlie Jane?
Charlie Jane: [00:35:21] Yeah, my third and final recommendation of perennial favorites is Serafina by Rachel Hartman, which is a book that people have been recommending to me forever. It's another YA book, full disclosure. And it's about a young woman, who is half human, half dragon. And she's trying to hide this fact from everybody because there's all these taboos around humans and dragons intermingling and humans and dragons have a very delicate peace that has been kept for the past 20 years. But you know, you'll be shocked to learn that the peace between humans and dragons is on the verge of falling apart, and that humans and dragons are running into some trouble. And that there's a plot to start a war between humans and dragons. And basically, it's what you'd expect from this person who is kind of caught between two different cultures and has two very different worlds that she belongs to. And she has a really cool dragon mentor, but she also has all these human friends. And she's trying to keep a foot in both worlds, but also hide the fact that she's part dragon.
[00:36:22] And it's a whole, all that stuff is just as exciting and interesting and has all the things to say about identity that you would expect. But meanwhile, there's just all these interesting court politics and all these interesting little details of the world building that are so perfect and fascinating and kind of stick in your head about the way that the society is organized. And the all the prejudices that people have, and all of the ways that humans and dragons kind of get on each other's nerves and what it's like for a dragon to be in human form versus in dragon form. An how does it feel different for, how do dragons have different emotions, when they're in a human kind of suit, or whatever than versus in dragon form.
[00:37:03] But also, meanwhile, the main character is a musician and a conductor and she's constantly, while she's doing all this other stuff, she's constantly trying to get musical performances together and get the musicians to play on cue, and this one person is coming in half a beat too early. Just music performance issues. And there's a big concert coming up and she's got to get the musicians ready. And that's all going on at the same time as she's working on stopping this plot to start a war between humans and dragons. And it just adds this whole other delightful layer, because it's just like, that's also important. She's got to get the music performance ready. And people are counting on her to make sure the music is good.
[00:37:49] And so I don't know, I just think it's a really beautiful, delightful book. And Rachel Hartman wrote some other books in that world, which are also wonderful and delightful. So, super recommend that and actually while we’re talking about Saladin, I just want to second that his Miles Morales comics are just, they’re everything that we're talking about. They’re family, they’re adventure, they’re uper fun. The first two trades are out now. And they're just, they're very worth tracking down. So Annalee, what's your third and final perennial book recommendation?
Annalee: [00:38:18] This is actually a recommendation for an entire ongoing series, the Murderbot series by Martha Wells, which is just it's pure comfort food. And that's what you want in wintertime. The point of view character is an artificial being, kind of a cyborg. Part biological material part computer, and they, or it, I guess they prefer it as a pronoun. It is designed to be what it nicknames itself, which is a murderbot. It's a military or a security type machine. But it manages to hack its control module in order to watch TV because what it really, really wants to do is just watch this soap opera that it loves. And it really doesn't like people very much. And it's a little bit, there's certain elements of the murderbot’s personality that are kind of aspie. It has a hard time with emotions. It has a hard time looking people in the face. And it's very relatable. Anyone who has social anxiety or is a little bit nerdy has probably had some of the feelings that murderbot has about like, please go away humans. I just want to watch my stories.
[00:39:34] Murderbot gets caught up in a massive cover up in this sort of far future space opera where big corporations are secretly conducting mining operations and trying to undermine scientific expeditions and undermine democratic processes. And over time, murderbot is kind of adopted by this group of what I would call maybe democratic socialists in space.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:07] Nice.
Annalee: [00:40:07] They're from a very egalitarian planet that is extremely diverse and is kind of run through scientific principles and principles of sharing property. And they're trying to also fight back against this corporate plot. And murderbot is reluctantly kind of involved. I mean, what murderbot really wants us to be left alone, a little bit like the Hulk, which might be why I like these books so much, because I do relate to the Hulk. But there's a series of novellas that you can read that start with the novella “All Systems Red.” And now there's a novel that's just come out, and there's going to be another novel, I think that she's working on another one. I don't think she's ever going to stop writing this series, because people love them, Martha Wells loves them, there's just always going to be more murderbot. And ultimately, it is kind of a thriller mystery structure. So once one kind of weird corporate conspiracy is resolved, there can always be more.
[00:41:13] But the true joy of these books is the wisecracking personality of the robot. And this beautiful found family that it finds itself a part of. Like I said, slightly reluctantly a part of. And it also deals with all kinds of really weighty issues around corporate responsibility and governance. And who gets to be a person. Does murderbot get to own itself? Murder bot is basically property and so a big piece of the book is murderbot kind of coming to own itself and how that happens. And whether it's even really happening. I mean, that's one of the big questions.
[00:41:51] So it's fun, it always leaves you in a happy place. And there's just tons of it. So if you really need to just spend a week reading nothing but murderbot, there's enough out there now, thanks to Martha Wells being prolific, that you can really just immerse yourself.
[00:42:10] So that is my final recommendation. These books, we'll put them in our show notes, so you can find links to them. And again, we really hope that you'll find a good book to snuggle up with and that you'll buy books for your friends and family this winter as presents.
[00:42:32] And basically just remember the joy of the written word in a kind of a slow way. Not the fast writing of social media, the slow writing of the book.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:44] Yeah, and do please support local bookstores. It's really important right now. So, thank you so much for listening. This has been Our Opinions Are Correct. If you like our podcast, please leave a review on Apple and other places where reviews are. You can find our podcasts in all of the podcast places like pretty much under bushes, inside little mushrooms. At the podcast store on your street. All the places.
Annalee: [00:43:08] In the dragon’s lair.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:10] In the dragon’s lair, in the dragon's hoard, in the cave underneath the mountain. Yeah, it's in all those places. Please tell your friends. We're on Twitter as @OOACpod and we have a Patreon. If you would like to support us, we really appreciate all the support that we get on Patreon. And that's patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Annalee: [00:43:29] If you become a patron, you do get lots of extras. We post essays and excerpts from our works in progress. And if you donate enough, we’ll send you a free book, and we'll even sign it.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:40] For sure.
Annalee: [00:43:41] We'll sign it to whoever you want, including your pet dragon.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:44] For sure. Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much to Veronica Simonetti, our incredibly heroic and brilliant audio producer. Thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and thanks against you for listening. You are the best. Bye!
Annalee: [00:43:56] Bye!
[00:43:58] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.