Show Notes
The central figure of the New Weird, an unofficial movement fusing science fiction, fantasy, and horror with a literary sensibility, China Mieville is equally known for his award-winning, internationally bestselling novels, which include Perdido Street Station, The City and the City and The Last Days of New Paris, and his work as activist, historian, and scholar of the Marxist Left.
He joins us for a (mostly) spoiler-free conversation unveiling his most ambitious work of fiction to date. A heady brew of literary fiction, military and espionage adventure stories, horror, post-colonial magical realism, and much else besides, The Rouse is a milestone in Mieville's career and a landmark in modern fantasy writing. We discuss how he has personally changed in the two decades of the novel's gestation, the social status of the octopus, the end of the British empire, and the nature of grief and loss. Also: Ghostbusters!
Join us live! How To Academy hosts world-renowned artists, thinkers, and leaders live on stage across the UK and USA. Find out who’s appearing near you at howtoacademy.com.
Become a Member: How To Plus members receive £15 off every live event ticket, free access to biweekly livestreams, and an exclusive members-only podcast. Find out more at howtoacademy.com/htasubscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
More from How To Academy Podcast
Author and journalist Naomi Klein and writer and activist Astra Taylor join Historian David Olusoga to explore how apocalyptic visions of the future are working to justify the present-day costs of AI – from energy and water-hungry data centres to job displacement and mass surveillance. Naomi and Astra also trace the links between religious end-times movements, ethno-nationalism, climate anxiety, and anti-immigrant politics. They make the case for how we can resist, how communities are organizing across political divides, and why material improvements in people’s lives matter.
Sometimes life can feel like a lot. Even on a good day you will experience stress and fatigue. The nature of modern living guarantees it. However, the problem is not that we think too much, but that our nervous systems are too wound up to rest.
Why is liberal democracy losing public confidence—and what would it take to renew it? Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu joins Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf to discuss.
From an early age we learn to stop asking questions, judged and rewarded for the answers we give, not the questions we ask. In this episode, Lani Watson traces the hidden life of the question – from school, to therapy, to dating. Drawing on research across psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, Lani explains why we start questioning long before we can speak, how the act of asking fires up the brain's reward systems and primes us to learn, and why questions, and who gets to ask them, are never neutral.
David Duchovny has spent three decades refusing to stay in one lane. Two-time Golden Globe winner, four-time Emmy nominee, New York Times bestselling novelist, musician with three studio albums, filmmaker whose directorial debut premiered at Tribeca: the range is, by any measure, unusual. What connects it all is a preoccupation with the things that resist easy articulation. Grief, fathers, time, the self we can’t quite catch.