A nested novel that very pointedly bridges the litfic/specfic divide, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas takes some big swings at tricky topics. Abigail Nussbaum returns to the podcast with some thoughts on how the novel has aged, and how it’s still relevant to genre thinking today.

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• Guest: Abigail Nussbaum
• Title: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Host:Jake Casella Brookins
• Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork byRob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• ARB’s Fundraiser!!!
• Track Changes
• Aliya Whiteley’s The Misheard World & Abigail’s review
• Nina Allen
• Alexis Hall's Hell's Heart
• Olivia Waite
• Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
• Lincoln Michel's Metallic Realms
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
• Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees
• Readerville forum & Salon Magazine's “The Well”
• The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan
• Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape & Motherless Brooklyn
• Kate Atkinson's Case Histories
• Our episode on The Historian
• Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
• New Wave, Cyberpunk, Mundane SF, The New Weird
• China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station
• The “New Adult” category of books
• Taylor Jenkins Reed
• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe
• Aragorn’s Tax Policy
• Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending
• Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
• Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
• Jean Baudrillard
• William Gibson
• The Stanford marshmallow experiment
• The Chatham Islands, Moriori & Māori peoples
• Charlie Jane Anders’ piece on Cloud Atlas
• The Velvet Underground joke (not many people listened, but everybody who did started a band)
• Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
• Niall Harrison’s “In Search of Green Overshoots”
• The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift
• In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
• Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
• Abigail's Blog & Bluesky
• Tolkien Series: Roseanna Pendlebury & Ed Morland’s, Ranged Touch’s Shelved by Genre, Nick Hubble, Jared Pechaček, Weird Studies