Dexter Palmer on Escaping the Literary Pigeonhole
From Retro Futurism to Historical Fiction
In this episode, Samuel Arbesman speaks with novelist Dexter Palmer, the author of three books that deliberately resist easy categorization. As they discuss, Palmer’s work can be thought of as literary fiction infused with science-fictional tropes and textures. His debut, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, is a kind of steampunk tale; Version Control explores a near-future world with dollops of time travel; and Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen is historical fiction drawn from the real 18th-century case of a woman who claimed—falsely—to be giving birth to rabbits.
Together, Arbesman and Palmer talk through Palmer’s novels, the nature of realism in science fiction, how to build a lived-in near future, the tradeoffs of exposition and “info dumps,” the strangeness of AI, the parallels between historical fiction and science fiction, and more