How to watch sci-fi author Annalee Newitz at the L.A. Times Book Club
Sci-fi author and science journalist Annalee Newitz joined the L.A. Times Book Club March 28 to discuss “The Terraformers.”
Newitz talked with columnist Carolina A. Miranda about flying moose, sentient technology and growing up in Irvine. The author also answered reader questions about the challenges of creating science fiction worlds, and cited Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Octavia E. Butler’s “Lilith’s Brood” trilogy as inspiration.
You can watch their conversation on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Newitz’s critically acclaimed third novel is a sprawling saga set 60,000 years in the future.
When Newitz set out to imagine the details of an exotic fantasy world, where a malevolent corporation seeks to remodel a planet into a better version of Earth, the first step was talking to actual scientists.
“I worked as a journalist for like a decade before I started writing fiction,” Newitz explains in a recent Times interview. “And my journalism was always focused on science and a lot of times on cutting-edge science, and it still is. So it’s definitely always kind of brushed up against speculative thinking.”
“I always start out by interviewing not just scientists, but people who are experts in the topics that I’ll be dealing with in the book.”
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The 53-year-old writer grew up in the Orange County planned community of Irvine. “My housing tract was dark brown and light brown, and they later changed it to sort of a nougat and gray,” Newitz told Locus magazine. “It was like growing up in a science-fiction novel. You were not allowed to change things.”
Now living in San Francisco, Newitz founded the science-fiction website io9 and later served as editor-in-chief at Gizmodo. They also are the author of “Autonomous” and “The Future of Another Timeline,” as well as a 2013 finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science and technology for “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.”
“The Terraformers” is the book club’s March selection. Reviewer Mark Athitakis called the novel “an ingenious, galaxy-brain book.”
During April, the book club is reading Gabrielle Zevin’s bestselling novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.” On April 22, Zevin joins us for a conversation with Times Assistant Managing Editor Samantha Melbourneweaver at the Festival of Books. Ticket information and the full festival schedule is online.
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