Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads: Life on Europa Looks Too Much Like America
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4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 August 2022
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
David Plotz talks with author Mat Johnson about his new novel Invisible Things. Johnson’s novel tells the story of a group of astronauts that land in a bubble colony on Jupiter's biggest moon.
They talk about the challenges of writing satire when reality feels fake, how mediocre people rise up by sucking up, and why we need to look at the invisible things in our daily lives.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for August 2022. |
| 0:10.5 | It's the Invisible Things edition. |
| 0:12.5 | I'm David Plotz of Citicast. |
| 0:14.2 | I'm in Washington, D.C., and I am joined today on GabFest Reeds by Matt Johnson. |
| 0:20.5 | Matt and I are going to talk about his wild, strange, |
| 0:24.4 | and very funny, new novel, visible things. Matt is the Knight Chair of Humanities at the University |
| 0:30.3 | of Oregon. And he's the author of books of nonfiction, graphic novels, and novels, including |
| 0:35.1 | him and Loving Day, Loving Day being an Emily Bazelan favorite. Matt, welcome to Gapest Reeds. Congratulations on Invisible Things. Hey, nice to meet you. |
| 0:48.1 | So Invisible Things is an allegorical novel about New Roanoke, a city inside a bubble located on a moon of Jupiter. A U.S. spaceship discovers New Roanoke, which turns out to be a pleasant facsimile of an American city, complete with all the fast food outlets of the home planet, but populated entirely by people who were inexplicably kidnapped from Earth and woke up on New Roanoke. |
| 1:12.8 | New Roanoke has a governing party. It has a Fox-like TV network. It has lots of economic inequality |
| 1:18.7 | and is sustained by shipments of goods that appear to come from nowhere. The story of invisible |
| 1:25.7 | things is about the tumult unleashed when a pair of American spaceships and their crews arrive at New Roanoke and what happens then. |
| 1:35.8 | And it's an extremely funny and political and ominous kind of book, more so even than my brief summary suggests. |
| 1:43.6 | So, Matt, first of all, it reminded me, |
| 1:46.9 | as I'm sure it will remind everyone who reads it of a book I have not read since high school, |
| 1:50.6 | which is Gulliver's Travels. Was that an inspiration for this book? Yes, and also completely |
| 1:55.7 | inadvertently. Like, a lot of times when I'm done is when I look and see the DNA, you know, of certain books. |
| 2:03.1 | And things like Gulliver's Travel has such a massive impact on so many books that it's not |
| 2:08.6 | just, you know, the original, but that the entire way we frame the conversation ends up covering |
| 2:13.2 | that. Like originally, the last two books I wrote about monsters under the ice in Antarctica. |
| 2:20.1 | And, you know, I had originally been inspired by the first movie I ever saw alone, |
| 2:25.7 | John Carpenter's The Thing. |
... |
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