Episodes | Book Fight!

May 20, 2019
by mikeingram25 1 Comment

Episode 278: Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach

Since we’re doing an entire season on future-looking books, stories, and essays, it seemed like it would be a real oversight to not consider at least one utopian novel. Ernest Callenbach wrote Ecotopia while living in Berkeley and working as an editor for the University of California Press. He couldn’t find a publisher, but managed to get the money together to self-publish the novel (a more expensive, and more difficult proposition in 1974 than it is today). The book built up a cult following, and after an excerpt appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Ecotopia was picked up by Bantam and given a wider release. Now, more than forty years after its release, it’s a book that’s still taught at universities and discussed in environmental circles.

The novel is set in 1999, a few years after the Pacific Northwest and Northern California have seceded from the United States. The book’s narrator is the first journalist to visit and report from inside Ecotopia; the book alternates between his newspaper dispatches and his personal journals. We talk about the book’s utopian vision, and to what degree it still feels environmentally relevant. We also talk about utopians more generally. We live in a time when dystopian stories are everywhere–in novels, on movie screens, and on television. Is there room in our current world for utopian storytelling? And what might that look like?

As always, you can stream the show right here on our site, or download the mp3 file to listen to later. Or check us out in Apple podcasts, where you can subscribe (for free!) and catch up on older episodes. We’re also available on Spotify, Stitcher, or just about any other podcast app. If for some reason you can’t find us in your favorite app, please reach out and let us know!

If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our Patreon, which helps us make a bit of money each month and keep the show going. For just $5 a month, you’ll get access to a monthly bonus episode, Book Fight After Dark, in which we visit some of the weirder, goofier corners of the literary world. Recently, that’s involved reading a paranormal romance novel, the debut novel of Jersey Shore’s Snookie, and the novelization of the movie Battleship (yes, based on the popular board game).

Thanks for listening!

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Episode 277: “Preview of The War We Do Not Want,” from Collier’s Magazine, 1951

In October 1951, Collier’s Magazine gave over an entire weekly issue to imagining a possible war with the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Perhaps in the midst of American Cold War anxiety, this issue seemed less patently insane. But to a modern reader it’s hard to fathom how Collier’s got more than twenty authors to embark on a project that feels like one part anti-communist propaganda and one part teenage war fantasy. You can read a PDF version of the entire issue here (and check out the sweet midcentury ads)

We talk about the magazine’s secretive project, which they dubbed “Operation Eggnog,” and the contributors’ odd conceptions of how a full-scale atomic war might play out.

Also this week: a special issue of Penthouse Magazine that imagined sex in outer space (while also previewing the launch of OMNI).

Thanks for listening!

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May 5, 2019
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Episode 276: E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”

This week we read a science fiction story by someone you probably don’t associate with science fiction. In 1909, E.M. Forster wrote a story called “The Machine Stops” that imagines people living in isolation, in apartments under the eqrth, and communicating to each through technology that looks a lot like Skype.

Also this week, we talk about futuristic stick-shaped foods.

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April 28, 2019
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Episode 275: Domes!

This week we continue our Spring Forward season by discussing a short story by Steven Millhauser called “The Dome. The piece envisions a future in which individual homeowners start building domes over their houses, followed by neighborhoods, then cities, then the entire United States of America. We talk about the story as a thought experiment, and how to write a successful story that has no characters (at least not in the traditional sense).

In the second half of the show we talk about domes: dome houses, and proposals to cover towns and cities with domes.

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April 22, 2019
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Episode 274: How to Warn Future Humans of the Mess We’ve Made

This week we continue our Spring Forward season by discussing an essay by Matt Jones that first appeared in The New England Review and was then republished by The Lit Hub. The essay, titled How Can We Warn Future Humans of the Poison We Buried Underground?, is a kind of thought experiment brought on by an actual project, in which a team of thinkers was tasked with coming up with a way to communicate to future societies that we’d buried nuclear waste under a specific spot in the desert. The essay delves into various ways that futurists think of possible futures, and the inherent optimist in even imagining a future.

We also talk about what the future of food looked like to people in the middle part of the twentieth century, and atomic gardens, and Betty Crocker’s Recipe Card Library. You can read more on that last subject here, via the New York Times Magazine.

If you have suggestions for things we should check out this season, let us know! We’re not just interested in traditional science fiction, but any kind of writing that imagines a possible future (including those written long enough ago that their “futures” have already passed).

Thanks for listening!

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April 15, 2019
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Episode 273: The People’s Future of the United States, Part II

This week we continue our Spring Forward season with two short stories: one that imagines a future in which books have been outlawed, and people have to write stories on their bodies; and one in which a strongman leader puts the sun on trial. Both are from a new anthology, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, A People’s Future of the United States, which takes its inspiration from Howard Zinn’s famous work of populist history. LaValle and Adams put out a call for writing that imagined the future from the perspective of the oppressed, the put-upon, the discriminated-against, and the marginalized.

We also talk about the future of food, as imagined in the early part of the 20th century, and we taste test some new “around the world” M&M flavors.

Thanks for listening!

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April 8, 2019
by mikeingram25 1 Comment

Episode 272: Spring Forward!

Hello, Book Fighters! It’s a new season, and that means it’s time for a new seasonal theme: Spring Forward! For the next several week, we’ll be reading future-looking stories, books, and essays, and talking about literary visions of the future throughout various times in history. First up, we’ve got two stories from a new anthology, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, A People’s Future of the United States. Taking their inspiration from Howard Zinn’s famous work of populist history, LaValle and Adams put out a call for writing that imagined the future from the perspective of the oppressed, the put-upon, the discriminated-against, and the marginalized. On this week’s show we discuss two stories from the anthology, one which imagines a United States on the cusp of making slavery legal again, and one in which women’s reproductive rights have been so curtailed that teenage girls sell condoms and IUDs on street corners.