I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen, wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerd at Book Club.

It's just like a regular book club, except you don't have to talk if you don't want to.

It is the month of October in the year 2021 somehow, and our selection this month is Rika Auki's Light from Uncommon Stars. It's a sci-fi novel about violin prodigies and interstellar spaceships disguised

as donut shops, among many other things. Today's guest is Rika Aoki. She is here for a spoiler-free chat about the book.

Rika, welcome to Nurdat. Thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here. And thanks everybody for listening.

Oh, my gosh. So happy to have you. I thought this was

just such a beautiful and heartfelt novel. And I have a lot of questions. So this is great.

I want to start with talking about the characters. I don't think it gives too much a way to say we kind of have three main characters. We have Katrina, who's a trans run away. We've got Shizuka, who's a violin teacher, who made a deal with the devil, and then we

have Lon, who's an interstellar refugee. I mean, in a lot of ways, at first glance, you would

think those are three different books. Did you always envision such different characters in the

same story? Absolutely. A lot of this comes from my own personal experience. When one is queer and a person of color,

one has many books going on at the same time. So what would sometimes happen is I would be

speaking to my family and then suddenly my friend would call who's another writer and I would

have to switch books and always know where I left

the last one. Also, many in my family, four better or worse aren't very accepting of queer and

trans identities and I still love them very much. So I have to remember where I was in the book

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