138: Chloe Benjamin: Under Story – From The Immortalists to an Epic Literary Sci-Fi Novel

New York Times bestselling author Chloe Benjamin joins me to talk about Under Story, her first novel since the international bestseller The Immortalists – and a book I loved so much I read all 500 pages twice before this interview.Under Story follows divorced scientists Laurel and Eli, who are unexpectedly reunited at a research base in Antarctica, where a mysterious visual disturbance known as the Arc is behaving strangely. What follows is a genre-blending novel bringing together relationships, nature, physics, fungi, parallel universes and some enormous questions about what we know – and don't know – about our world.Chloe tells me about the real scientific story that first sparked the idea for Under Story, why the first draft took more than five years to write, and the extraordinary amount of research that went into creating it. We talk about everything from neutrino experiments and theoretical physics to fungi, Antarctica and a women's mushroom conference – as well as how Chloe decided where scientific reality should end and fiction could begin.Chloe also tells me about the forthcoming film adaptation of Under Story, her role as a producer and what it feels like to hand such an intricate story over to a screenwriter.And, of course, we finish with what’s in Chloe’s good books, as she recommends Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, The Giver by Lois Lowry and Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others.If you love ambitious literary fiction, speculative and science fiction, books about parallel universes or novels that leave you thinking long after you've finished them, this is an episode – and a book – you won't want to miss.