XXI: Is Sci-fi Suffering from Success? w/Lillian Wang Selonick

We were super excited to talk to science fiction writer and fellow Substacker Lillian Wang Selonick. We discuss some topics from her essays on the value of Worldbuilding, the adoption of sci-fi tropes in literary books, what is meant by the term speculative fiction, Death’s End, Philip K. Dick, and more.Apologies for the long delay between episodes. We recorded this episode about three weeks ago, but due to going to Worldcon, Gordon getting sick (twice!), and Kevin going on vacation it took a while to publish. In the backstage portion, we talk about our experience at Worldcon and accepting fiction submissions for Synthesized Sunsets.Also, if you like the episode you can check out Lillian on the Futurist Letters podcast as well. Hope you enjoy listening!TIMESTAMPS:0:12 - Introduction1:17 - Discussing “Worldbuilding”3:38 - You don't need to have a rigorous, highly-engineered, world to write a SFF story5:53 - Is worldbuilding overused as a concept for fantasy?6:40 - Worldbuilding vs. world conjuring8:43 - What makes something real science fiction11:55 - It's cool when it is clear an author is really passionate about science13:37 - Sci-fi has become a bit too defined by its tropes14:46 - Speculative-literary hybrid books17:32 - We shouldn't be giving sci-fi awards to successful literary books19:53 - What is meant by the term speculative fiction?22:27 - Speculative fiction partially evolved as a term due to sci-fi authors seeing it as more serious23:46 - Defining speculative fiction by its community26:44 - Speculative is starting to be used more for literary books with some tropes28:45 - The Dune movies were big for sci-fi30:49 - Villeneuve has been an ambassador for sci-fi 31:38 - Blade Runner 2049 looks amazing but is unmemorable otherwise33:49 - What makes Philip K. Dick so good?35:48 - PKD creates fiction that plays with epistemic certainty39:33 - Ray Bradbury and PKD feel similar40:55 - PKD is very popular in China43:13 - Talking about “Death's End”45:15 - Death's End starting at the Siege of Constantinople was crazy49:02 - How is PKD similar to Saul Bellow?52:26 - The different types of men writing women58:40 - Writing at Futurist Letters1:01:05 - Discussing Lillian’s story “A Riot at Red Plan-It! Park”1:04:52 - Conclusion and Short Story Recommendation of “Hinterlands” by William Gibson from his collection “Burning Chrome”1:06:18 - Start of Synthesized Sunsets Backstage1:06:42 - Poorly remembered thoughts on the episode1:07:26 - Discussing “Ubik” and “The Lathe of Heaven”1:13:57 - Elaborating on the case for a circular definition of speculative fiction1:18:41 - Military sci-fi is becoming less speculative fiction1:20:40 - A genre being defined circularly is less strange than it may sound1:21:25 - Our experience at Worldcon1:22:01 - It's very easy to see and talk to relatively famous people at Worldcon1:25:49 - Ada Palmer was really impressive1:28:38 - Interesting Joanna Russ panel with friend of the pod Rich Horton1:31:25 - Talking about the Hugo Awards1:32:51 - It would have been cool if the Hugo Awards were more of a spectacle1:36:52 - The Hugo Awards should be more focused around Best Novel1:37:21 - The convention as a whole was quite well run1:41:28 - Our experience receiving fiction submissions1:43:30 - We've been pleasantly surprised with the general level of quality from submissions1:46:34 - Conclusion and Short Story Recommendation of “10207” by Emma Burnett This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit synthesizedsunsets.substack.com/subscribe