Ned Beauman talks Arc about The Teleportation Accident, a genre-splitting novel that, unlike his dark debut Boxer Beetle, wears its comic impulses on its sleeve. When culpably naive Weimer emigre Anton Loeser stumbles into the Los Angeles dreamtime in the late 1930s, he triggers a series of world-shattering incidents, none of which involve him getting laid.
Category Archives: books
An interview with Liz Jensen
Liz Jensen dropped into Arc’s offices to discuss her new book The Uninvited, an accessible and very frightening vision of ecological and political crisis.
“I thought about John Wyndham a lot,” she says, “and the ways he found to tell a complex, global story from a single, intimate point of view.” The result is chilling. Across the world, children are killing their families. The experts say it’s an isolated incident – and they’re wrong.
An interview with Jake Arnott
In June 2012 novelist Jake Arnott, best known for period thrillers The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers, talked to Arc about his novel The House of Rumour, an esoteric and sometimes disturbing reimagining of science fiction’s Golden Age.
An interview with Lee Smolin
Can the future be predicted? In his book Time Reborn (2013), physicist Lee Smolin set out to show that the world is an unpredictable place, and that common-sense, Newtonian habits of thought prove seriously mistaken when applied to the great unbounded problems of our age, from economics to climate change.
In the first part of this interview, conducted for Arc magazine, Lee Smolin explains why Newtonian physics cannot be applied to the world as a whole, and why the work of Newton’s great rival, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, may hold the key to a new model of the universe.
… and in the second part Smolin explores the human implications of a world where time is real and true novelty in nature is possible.
An interview with China Miéville
China Miéville speaks to Arc about Railsea, his delirious and parched recasting of Herman Melville’s epic Moby Dick.
An interview with Nick Harkaway
In May 2012, novelist and digital pundit Nick Harkaway talked to me about Attenuation, his story in Arc 1.2, and about The Blind Giant, a guide to being human in a digital world.
An interview with M John Harrison
Mike Harrison, whose story In Autotelia appeared in the inaugural issue of Arc, reveals his love of science, takes a wry view of the human project, and looks back on his ten-year effort to give science fiction its long-overdue Saturday night.
And here he discusses In Autotelia: “There’s more crammed into those 4000 words than there is crammed into the entire Light trilogy,” he says. “The fewer words you use, the more you can stuff in, which is why poetry is so good, and so hard to unpick.”