Pagenerd
Pagenerd is a sci-fi book club for people who struggle with traditional book clubs. Each episode, the hosts pick a sci-fi novel—current or classic—and explore its world, characters, and the science behind it. They discuss what it would be like to exist in that novel and how well it's realized on the page. Listeners can read along if they wish, with a full list of upcoming books available at pagenerd.com. The show is produced by Jay Cockburn and hosted by Sarah Stockdale, Tommy Guy, Richard Vieweg, and Andrew Corway.
Episodes
The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
This week, the gang tackles H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. We figured a century and a quarter was a fair amount of time to respect NO SPOILERS.
Sarah, Tommy, Rick, and Andrew dig into the novel that helped invent the alien invasion epic. We explore Wells' surprisingly radical attempt to help readers empathize with colonized peoples by putting Britain on the receiving end of an alien invasion.
Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente
This week, the gang dives into Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente, a novel that asks one important question: what if Eurovision decided the fate of entire civilizations? The answer involves flamingo anglerfish, intergalactic threesomes, washed-up glam rock stars, a hyper-masculine moonbeam, and enough commas to qualify as a form of literary jazz.
Sarah, Tommy, Rick, and Andrew do their best to
Aurora Rising/The Prefect, by Alastair Reynolds
This week, the Pagenerd crew tackles hyper pigs, consensual cannibalism, corpse-eating architecture, a freaky little child AI, planetary genocide, and a supervillain called “The Clockmaker.” Alastair Reynolds Aurora Rising (originally called The Prefect) is a fever dream of a detective novel that somehow manages to jam all those things into a single story.
Sarah, Tommy, Rick, and Andrew attempt to
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Somehow, Ishiguro has written a book that Sarah found both boring and emotionally devastating at the same time. The banality of the language is part of the darkness of this semi-dystopian trip inside the mind of Klara, a solar-powered artificial friend who is generally treated like crap by the humans around her.
The novel is a masterpiece by the Nobel laureate who wrote Remains of the Day, but it
The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Leguin (Part 2 of 2)
The Pagenerds are back with part two of The Dispossessed, where Ursula K. Le Guin somehow takes an already brilliant book and makes it hit even harder.
This section gets deeply personal. We follow Shevek as he wrestles with fame, isolation, intellectual ego (and the consolidation of publishing power), and the very messy reality of trying to build a better world with other humans. The political con
The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Leguin (Part 1 of 2)
The Pagenerds finally tackle Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is a lot in the best way possible. Naturally, we had to split this one into two parts.
This book absolutely rocks. Le Guin drops us onto two sister planets locked in ideological opposition, then uses one physicist’s journey to unpack capitalism, anarchism (the good kind?), power, sex stuff, academia, love, and what it actuall
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
The Forever War is a book that asks "Who hurt author Joe Haldeman?” and the answer is: The United States Military.
This book is about a futuristic war fought by soldiers in power armour, but really it's about every war and every soldier. It was written in 1974, yet it feels disturbingly current.
Haldeman wrote this book after his experience as a combat engineer in the Vietnam War. So it reads as a
Intercepts, by T.J. Payne
The Intercepts is an excellent beach read if you’re deeply unwell. It’s also the Pagenerds very first horror sci-fi, so thanks T.J. Payne.
The novel drops us into a secret government facility where people are kept underground and understimulated for some… experimentation. We uncover what in the MKUltra is going on through the eyes of a program manager and his teenage daughter. There’s a beige, mi
Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy
Wild Dark Shore is the kind of book that makes you openly weep on the subway.
Charlotte McConaghy drops us onto a remote, storm-battered island filled with seals, secrets, and a family holding on a little too tightly to both. In this episode the Pagenerds attempt to unpack it and emotionally survive it, as the story unfolds into something about grief, survival, and what we owe each other at the en
All Systems Red (Murderbot), by Martha Wells
Murderbot is the patron saint of “please stop talking to me”, and we love that for it.
The pagenerds dive into All Systems Red by Martha Wells and the deeply relatable life of Murderbot— an anxious, rogue security android that saves humans mostly so it can get back to watching its shows. They talk about corporate dystopias, introversion, androgynous (hot) Alexander Skarsgard, and why this novella
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is often called the first science fiction novel for good reason. The problematic goth queen was only 18 when she wrote this novel at a gloomy lakehouse in Switzerland in 1816, but its lessons about scientific hubris and themes of parental abandonment and guilt are forever relevant. Shelley’s prose remains haunting and gorgeous, and her social
Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is an elegantly told time travel mystery that takes us from the dark and beautiful woods of Vancouver Island to a dilapidated old city on the Moon — a lunar Toledo, according to Pagenerd Tommy. The Pagenerds follow some less-than-competent time detectives across eras and try to explain how time travel actually works using dinosaurs, toilets and movies Tom
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter is like a sci-fi thriller version of Sliding Doors if you needed a basic understanding of quantum mechanics to watch Sliding Doors. The novel asks “what if in a different timeline there’s a version of you that didn’t have a kid, and instead became a famous scientist?”, and “what if you got in a big fight with all the other versions of you?”
Pagenerd Sarah read this boo
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
If you like movies with hot basic boys doing science magic then you’ll love Andy Weir. The Martian had Matt Damon as Mark Watney and now his next novel, Project Hail Mary is coming out as a movie starring Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace. Join the Pagenerds on our spoiler heavy adventure into stinky spaceships with dog-sized spiders (crabs?) as we figure out whether Ryland Grace could actually save Ea
Pagenerd, out now!
Pagenerd is a sci-fi book club for people who suck at book clubs. You can read along if you want, but we’ll tell you what happens and have some fun figuring out the science, plot and characters along the way. In each episode we pick a sci-fi novel — current or classic — and explore its world and characters, discussing what it would be like to exist in that novel and how well it's realised on the p
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