{"id":33512,"date":"2023-03-24T09:09:54","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T13:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=33512"},"modified":"2023-03-24T09:09:54","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T13:09:54","slug":"annalee-newitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2023\/03\/24\/annalee-newitz\/","title":{"rendered":"Settle in for arancini with Annalee Newitz in Episode 194 of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s time to return to Boskone<\/a> for the second of three conversations recorded there, following last episode’s chat with Walter Jon Williams<\/a>. I invite you to take a seat at the table with my guest Annalee Newitz<\/a> at Tony and Elaine\u2019s<\/a>, a casual, old school, Italian red sauce restaurant in the North End of Boston.<\/p>\n

Annalee is the author of three novels \u2014\u00a0The Terraformers <\/em>(just out in January), The Future of Another Timeline<\/em>, and\u00a0their debut novel\u00a0Autonomous<\/em>, which won the Lambda\u00a0Literary Award, and was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards.\u00a0Their short story \u201cWhen Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis\u201d won the 2019 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. \u00a0Their nonfiction books include Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age<\/em>, which was a national bestseller and was praised in The New York Times<\/em>, The San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>, and The New Yorker<\/em>, and\u00a0Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction<\/em>,\u00a0which was a finalist for the LA Times<\/em> Book Prize in science.<\/p>\n

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They\u2019re also\u00a0the co-editor of the essay collection She\u2019s Such A Geek\u00a0<\/em>(Seal Press), and author of Pretend We\u2019re Dead: Capitalist\u00a0Monsters in American Pop Culture\u00a0<\/em>(Duke University Press). They’re the co-host with Charlie Jane Anders of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct<\/em><\/a>, and in addition to having been the founder of io9<\/em>, served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We discussed how difficult (and disappointing) it would have been to eat a trilobite, what writing their non-fiction books taught them about creating the arcs of novels, why their brain seems more suited for novels than short stories, how best to include a message in fiction without the soapbox overwhelming the story, the greatest bad review one of their books ever got (it involved creamed corn), how to inhabit characters who are hundreds of years old, fun facts they learned about moose which helped make their new book better, the music they blasted to rev up for one of the novel’s big action scenes, how to make the growth of a fictional romance believable to readers, the serendipitous way in which Ken McLeod rekindled their love of science fiction, and much more.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s how you can join us — <\/p>\n

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts<\/a> — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 193 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

2) Listen via the RSS feed of http:\/\/eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com\/rss<\/a> on the device of your choice.<\/p>\n

3) Or simply use the embed below.<\/p>\n