6.2 What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington (RB)

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Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard (FSU) for a conversation about the archives, methods, and cosmologies that inform his speculative fiction. Clark’s fiction blends fantasy and horror elements with richly drawn historical worlds that speak to his academic life as a historian. Most recently, Ring Shout (2020) maps Lovecraftian horror and eldritch demons into the Ku Klux Klan’s 1920s terrorism in the U.S. South, while A Master Of Djinn (2021) brings angels and the titular djinns into a steampunk version of Egypt focalized around a pair of female detectives with the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. The conversation probes the way Clark’s work limns “the supernatural and the mundane,” delving into his formative experiences with the everyday presence of ancestors in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, the way he writes deities into mortal stories without flattening free will, and why he is committed to writing stories that talk about nations, politics, and racism, even in worlds where the supernatural is just as present. As the episode wraps up, Clark talks about the process that led to his celebrated 2018 story “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” which consists of nine vignettes imagining the lives of the enslaved people whose teeth Washington used for his dentures. Stay tuned for Clark’s iconic answer to this season’s signature question—a must-listen for anybody who has always suspected there’s something weird lurking beneath the surface of children’s television!

Mentioned in this Episode:

andré carrington’s Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
Them!
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Boris Karloff
Vincent Price
Star Trek
The Twilight Zone
The Bayou Classic
Toni Morrison
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time
Edward Said’s Orientalism
The Battle of Algiers
The Maxim gun
The George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
National Museum of African American History and Culture

Listen and Read:

Audio: What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic

Transcript: 6.2 What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic

We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí – Novel Dialogue

Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel form. Álvaro, author of the trippy You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead, 2024), explains how the opening letter to his translator Natasha mirrors the letter to his editor, Teresa, in Spanish, and how both letters become part of the fiction. Fitting for a novel that crosses Nahua and Mayan, Moctezuma and Cortés, Mexican history and the glam rock band T. Rex. The English translation—which Álvaro calls the book of Natasha—is longer, filled with changes and additions and revisions, and so translation becomes “another life for the book.” From the living book to its contents, Maia asks how You Dreamed of Empires blends the gorgeous and the grotesque, slapstick humor and extreme violence, historical detail and mischievous metafictional departures. Álvaro links his work to Season 9’s theme of TECH by pointing out the novel’s longstanding use as a tool to laugh about the powerful, to tell them that what they’re saying is not true, and to articulate politics through contradiction and humor. After discussing the encounter of Moctezuma and Cortés (or really, of their translators, including a very magical bite of cactus) as the moment that changes everything in history, Álvaro makes a surprising historical swerve in his answer to this season’s signature question. Mentions:Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death, You Dreamed of Empires, Now I SurrenderNahuaNatasha WimmerTeresa Ariño, AnagramaSergio Pitol, Enrique Vila-Matas, Javier Marías, Roberto BolañoMiguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; Laurence Sterne; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s TravelsOctavio Paz saying New Spain was a kingdom in One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, translated by Helen R. Lane.Edward SaidLèse-majestéT. Rex, “Monolith”Gonzalo GuerreroThe Colegio de Santa Cruz de TlatelolcoJosé Emilio PachecoMichel FoucaultMichelangeloSaint Paul, Epistle to the RomansNoam ChomskyTlaxcalas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  1. We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
  2. 9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)
  3. 9.4 “That In Between Time,” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)
  4. 9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)
  5. 9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
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