New Books in Science Fiction

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the first two episodes of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. The show posits an extraordinary intervention in worldwide politics and culture producing a utopia (that is of course simultaneously a dystopia) of quiescent bliss. Is the show shaping up to be another hit for the showrunner, previously responsible for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we conclude our analysis of the FX series Alien: Earth with episode 7, “Emergence” and episode 8, “The Real Monsters.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we continue our analysis of the FX series Alien: Earth with episode 5, “In Space, No One…” and episode 6, “The Fly.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China? That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone (Columbia UP, 2025), written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion, and then to the fantastical “Realm of Civilization,” a world that, in Wu’s eyes, reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced Chinese beliefs. Liz Webber just released a new translation on New Story of the Stone, and joins us today to talk about this piece of literary fanfiction, and what political points Wu wanted to achieve by writing his work of early Chinese science fiction. Liz Evans Weber is currently an assistant professor of instruction in Chinese and research assistant professor at the University of Rochester in New York, where she teaches a wide range of courses on Chinese literature and a workshop course on Chinese-to-English literary translation. Her published translations also include the short story “Boundless Night” by Yu Dafu (Renditions, Spring 2021) In 2025, she was awarded a Translation Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts for work on her next translation project, Flower in a Sea of Resentment by Jin Songcen and Zeng Pu. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of New Story of the Stone. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction

This interview is with one of the translators, M. Lynx Qualey. A girl must save herself and her family after discovering her society's secrets in this sci-fi novel in translation. I Want Golden Eyes (U Texas Press, 2025) is set on the Comoros Islands at the end of this century in a futuristic city called Quartzia, the home of a genetically privileged minority called the Golden Eyes. The rest of the population, the Limiteds, live in a cavity called the Hive beneath the city. Dalia is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hive but works with her family in Quartzia at Professor Adam’s house, where she cleans, her sister grows organic food in the garden, and her deaf father works as the cook. Because books are forbidden in the Hive, Dalia secretly borrows math texts from the professor’s library and smuggles them to read in the Hive. When Professor Adam, who is famous for engineering embryos with enhanced genes, discovers Dalia’s crime, he enslaves her for two years in his library. Dalia seeks to flee the city with her family after overhearing the professor being ordered to design genetic traits for the president’s expected baby and realizes that Golden Eyes are not privileged by nature’s selection, as she was led to believe, but by authority and money. Maria Dadouch is a Syrian novelist, screenwriter, and children’s book author. She is the author of The Planet of Uncertainties, I Want Golden Eyes, The Heart is Behind the Rib, and other books, for which she has won several prestigious prizes. M. Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She is the founder of ArabLit. Her translated works include Wild Poppies, Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, and the Thunderbird trilogy. Sawad Hussain  is a translator from Arabic. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-fiction