New Books in Science Fiction

New Books in Science Fiction is a channel of the New Books Network, and its recent episodes work in two distinct modes. The first is the book conversation. Miranda Melcher, who introduces herself as one of the hosts, talks with Keith Cooper about Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact, published by Reaktion in 2025. The book asks entertaining questions: what a sunset on Tatooine would look like, whether the planet of Dune could be lived on, what life on an ocean world might be like. Water planets, Cooper says, are not a far-fetched idea at all. He traces the idea that water is scarce in the universe partly to H.G. Wells and Percival Lowell. Lowell was a wealthy man, not a professional astronomer. He misread an Italian astronomer's 'canali' on Mars as canals built by a dying civilization, then came to believe the story he had built. Other guests bring older texts back into view. Alexander B. Joy discusses Flaxman Low: Occult Detective by E. and H. Heron, reissued by MIT Press in 2026 as part of the Radium Age series. His evidence for how the two authors shared the work is small and exact: where quotation marks and dashes fall in each story. Another conversation turns to Wu Jianren's New Story of the Stone, an early Chinese science fiction novel, and to how Wu remakes Baoyu, a character from an earlier novel, as someone drawn to politics, society and technology rather than romance. The second mode is television, and it sounds different. Stephen Dyson and Geoff Dudas, who describe themselves as two political science professors, take on the first two episodes of Pluribus, the Apple TV series from Vince Gilligan. They read it for individualism and collectivity, utopia and dystopia, and the bond between art and its audience. A long signing scene at Barnes & Noble becomes evidence: Carol, a misanthrope before and after the change, writes the same inscription in every copy, and her fans blur together through her eyes. Alien: Earth gets the same episode-by-episode attention. One discussion reads the cyborg as a breakdown of old barriers, gender hierarchy among them, and asks whether Wendy might become a hero in an unexpected way instead of turning villain. Another settles on the point that on a ship full of saboteurs and murderous aliens, the real danger turns out to be fire. These TV conversations close by inviting other readings, then sign off with 'on that bombshell'. What links the two modes is close attention to evidence, whether that means punctuation, an old telescope report or a single scene. Start with Keith Cooper for the planets, or go to the Alien: Earth analyses if that series is already on the watch list.