You want to understand the world, you need to get your “Moby Dick” on. We’re heading in this ridiculous direction. I’m not talking the plague I’m talking the way in which our government’s responding to it. The original dystopian novel got it right!” And if there was ever a time to read “Moby Dick,” it’s now. It’s a great time to read the original speculative novel, Mary Shelley’s “ The Last Man.” Funny enough, it was a plague - I was like, “Damn, girl. I don’t think we can read it the way we read historical fiction, where we are separated from it by reality. I don’t think we can put that wall between us and dystopian fiction anymore. I know the people working to make this happen! I was watching “ Handmaid’s Tale” last night, and every time I watch it I go, “But this could actually happen.” I come out of evangelical church. The thing about dystopian fiction is, we focus on the horrors of it, but we never focus on the inevitability. It absolutely has, and it’s surprising how practical it is. You once said in an interview, about wanting to write speculative fiction: “We come to the end of what realism can express.” But it’s hard not to feel like life has become totally surreal. I’m like, “Wow! We’re at ‘ Walking Dead,’ and we don’t even have the zombies yet.”

I was reading about vigilantes in Maine blocking roads and forcing people they think are visitors to stay in their houses. So we’ll start with what’s usually not a very loaded question: How are you?Īll right as can be, I guess.

Here’s our edited conversation about busting genre walls, dystopia as realism under the pandemic and the prospect of pop-culture world domination. The book, the first in the planned Dark Star trilogy, is rooted in African mythology and animated by queer desire it expands the genre it enters, asking us to continue to expand our reality and explore our relationship to the very idea of truth. Narrated by a man called Tracker, whose supernaturally keen nose has earned him work as a kind of bounty hunter, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” is also a distinctly Jamesian entry into the fantasy canon. Marlon James’ fourth novel, “ Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” the winner of The Times’ inaugural Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, is his first foray into fantasy, but it retains the epic scope and kaleidoscopic quality familiar from his Booker Prize-winning novel, “ A Brief History of Seven Killings” - a mind-expanding, brain-bending sensibility that asks for (and rewards) a reader’s focus and dedication. If there’s a person you want to talk to in the midst of a pandemic, it’s probably a writer of speculative fiction - someone whose imagination is as wild and gnarly as the wild and gnarly times.

Black leopard red wolf by marlon james