132. James Morrow, author of Galapagos Regained

Geek's Guide to the Galaxy - A Science Fiction Podcast

David Barr Kirtley

Arts

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2015

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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0:00.0	Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.
0:17.0	Hello and welcome to episode 132 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.
0:24.0	Our guest today is author James Morrow, who you may remember from our panel on Being an atheist writer back in episode 111.
0:31.0	The Washington Post calls him the most provocative satiric voice in science fiction, and the
0:35.6	Denver Post has hailed him as Christianity's Salman Rushdie, only funnier and more sacrilegious.
0:41.2	His books include towing Jehovah, only begotten daughter and Bible stories for adults, and his latest book is called Kavapagos Regained. So Jim, welcome to the show.
0:50.0	Thank you, Dave. It's great to be here.
0:53.0	Okay, and so your new book is called Galapagos Regained, and you've said that the book was inspired
0:57.9	by your wife asking you, isn't it time you wrote your novel about Charles Darwin?
1:02.3	So why was it so inevitable that you
1:04.0	would one day write a book about Charles Darwin? Well I guess it's inevitable because
1:09.6	you should always do what your wife to do. I'm known primarily as a novelist of ideas, which is the
1:19.2	domain in which we sci-fi guys operate, as opposed to being a creator of realistic psychological fiction.
1:30.1	Going back to 2006 I published an historical novel called The Last Witchfinder, which was about
1:36.6	the coming of the scientific worldview, a celebration of the Enlightenment, and I managed to shoehorn some sort of intellectual content into just about every scene.
1:49.0	I mean, this is a book after all of which the minor characters include the likes of Isaac Newton and Robert Hook and the Baron the Montezquieu and Benjamin Franklin and I wanted to do something comparable.
2:01.0	The book, Last Witch Witchfinder had some success. So I wanted to try another
2:05.8	historical epic that would also be a dance of ideas and I just couldn't think of
2:11.0	anything. Weeks went by, months went by, and finally my wife
2:15.0	Kathy noticed my distress and said, but Jim ever since I've known you you've
2:20.1	been hectoring me about Charles Darwin.
2:23.0	Why don't you write a novel about him?
	...

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