Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here are your hosts. John Joseph Adams and David Barr

Kirtley.

Hi, this is Dave. And this is John.

And welcome to episode 70 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Juno Diaz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Woe.

One of the characters from that book, Union, is the focus of Diaz's new book, This is How You Lose Her.

Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic, which is the setting for his short story monstro, which recently appeared in the New Yorker's first ever science fiction issue.

Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Megan McCarran joins us to discuss fiction that straddles the border between fantasy and realism.

All right, so let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Juno Diaz. Welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you for having me, man.

Okay, so you were recently featured in the New Yorker's first ever science fiction issue.

Why do I think they chose this moment to do a science fiction issue?

That's a great question. I think again it speaks to sort of this shift in how everyone is viewing genre.

I would also say that a lot of these shifts are linked to economic considerations.

You know, it used to be a kind of a respectability thing that science fiction wasn't going to be allowed except for certain kinds of

practitioners. You know, Raymond Bradbury would perhaps be allowed in the door.

Hersal Kaye Le Gwen would be in the door, but the very concept of a science fiction issue would have been in asthma and previous New

York or administrations.

But I think that there is sort of a large generation shift and how we think about it, still there is also a lot of problems.

So what sort of response did the issue get and what sort of impact do you think it might have?

Is it safe to say zero and zero?

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