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 untangle a future powered by quickmatter, debate whether anyone actually understands what's happening, and marvel at Alastair Reynolds' ability to make the absolutely absurd feel strangely plausible.
This episode starts as a detective story and rapidly descends into chaos. We recommend surrendering to the experience.

If you’d like to support the pod you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com/cw/Pagenerd

Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente

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 page. 

If you do want to read along then you'll find a full list of what we're reading for upcoming episodes at pagenerd.com.

Pagenerd is Sarah Stockdale, Tommy Guy, Richard Vieweg and Andrew Corway. Jay Cockburn is the producer.