Sam Segan

It seems apt to call Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein a pastiche, in both content and form. It’s about the future of transhumanism–the idea that we can create immortality for our consciousnesses beyond our bodies–and its roots in the dream of Frankenstein. Winterson’s scope encompasses different genres, melded with abandoned: there’s postmodern satire; there’s romance; there’s historical fiction, and a close history of Mary Shelley. It’s fitting, then, too, that one of the novel’s protagonists, the scientist Ry, is trans and nonbinary (using the pronoun “he/his”). His lover, the scientist Victor Stein, muses that Ry’s nonbinary identity prefigures some future transhumanism: an existence as brains […]

In E.R. Ramzipoor’s novel The Ventriloquists, a cadre of Belgian resistance journalists risk their lives to lampoon Nazi propaganda. Almost unbelievably, the story is based on a real part of history: a group of the Belgian resistance really did get together to write and distribute a false version of the Nazi-led newspaper Le Soir. Most of them lost their lives for the project. All of the text from the satirical paper reproduced in the book is authentic. Some characters are composites of or riffs on real people; some are made up from whole cloth, like the narrator, a young girl disguised as […]