14 Women Writers Who Dominate The Universe Of Sci-Fi
For decades men dominated the world of science fiction. But, Maddie Crum reports, the tables have turned. Read why she things these women authors now dominate the field:
- L. Timmel Duchamp
- Emily St. John Mandel
- Octavia Butler
- Madeleine L’Engle
- Nnedi Okorafor
- Jo Walton
- Hiromi Goto
- Karen Joy Fowler
- Tanith Lee
- Alice Bradley Sheldon
- Nalo Hopkinson
- Karen Russell
- Leonora Carrington
- Sofia Samatar
Why you need an app to understand my novel
Iain Pears has always written complex books – his latest, Arcadia, has 10 separate story strands. To make his readers’ lives easier, he turned to interactive technology
Iain Pears laments, “What should be a simple task – write story, create software, publish – turns out to be anything but in practice.”
The author of An Instance of the Fingerpost, which my book club loved several years ago and which is on my list of books deserving a reread, explains that he undertook the project of both writing and producing an app for his latest work, Arcadia, because “I had reached the limit of my storytelling in book form and needed some new tools to get me to the next stage.”
His previous novels are all “complex structurally,” he explains, and since he wanted to write a book even more complex, he considered “how to make my readers’ lives as easy as possible by bypassing the limitations of the classic linear structure.”
In developing the software to aid readers, he writes, his main aim was “making the technology the servant of the story rather than its master.”
This is a fascinating look at how a writer attempts to use new technological tools as a way of expanding the possibilities of narrative. He compares his approach to the way the introduction of film influenced narrative: At first people simply set up cameras and recorded plays; only somewhat later did artists begin to explore the different possibilities that film offered to make a movie different from a stage performance.
Writing Arcadia did produce odd effects in ways that an ordinary book or ebook could not; scenes became more episodic and vignette-like; the demands of shifting from one point of view to another, and then to multiple ones in different worlds, required different ways of writing.
Arcadia will be published in Britain on September 3. A link at the end of this piece takes you to iTunes, where you can get the app.
Let authors take the quiet road
One question readers must always consider is how much they want to know about the author—or, more specifically, should what we know about an author influence how we react to or interpret a literary work?
This piece considers the case of Italian author Elena Ferrante, who eschews publicity so ferociously that most people don’t even know what she looks like.
Here writer Arifa Akbar wishes that more authors would follow Ferrante’s lead: “As Ferrante suggests, the book should surely be enough, though that is sadly not the reality for many pressured to deliver a performance after they have delivered their novel.”
11 Big Fat Debut Novels to Keep You Reading All Summer
Julianna Haubner writes:
While the classics have always had a reputation for intimidating length (Tolstoy, Dickens, I’m looking at you), we are now living in the era of an entirely new trend: the big, fat, juicy debut novel. Industry insiders (The Daily Beast and Vulture among them) have put in their two cents, but here’s ours: the bigger the better! Whether they’re fetching huge advances or sleeper successes, here are our favorite first-time tries that keep us reading past page five hundred.
These books are not all from the year. But read why she so enjoyed these authors’ big first novels:
- The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
- We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
- City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg
- House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
- A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
- The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
