Hello and welcome to Gap Fest Reads.

For August 2022, it's the Invisible Things edition I'm David Plot of CityCast, I'm in

Washington DC, and I am joined today on Gap Fest Reads by Matt Johnson.

Matt and I are going to talk about his wild, strange, and very funny, new, novel, visible

things.

It's the night chair of humanities at the University of Oregon, and he's the author of

books of nonfiction, graphic novels, and novels, including him and Loving Day, Loving

Day being an Emily Bazzlon, favorite Matt, welcome to Gap Fest Reads.

Congratulations on Invisible Things.

Hey, nice to meet you.

So Invisible Things is an allegorical novel about New Roanoke, a city inside a bubble

located on a moon of Jupiter, a US 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 are inexplicably kidnapped from

Earth and woke up on New Roanoke.

New Roanoke has a governing party, it has a fox-like TV network, it has lots of economic

inequality, and is sustained by shipments of goods that appear to come from nowhere.

The story of Invisible Things is about the tumult unleashed when a pair of American

spaceships and their crews arrive at New Roanoke, and what happens then, and it's an extremely

funny and political and ominous kind of book, more so even than my brief summary suggests.

So Matt, first of all, it reminded me, as I'm sure more remind everyone who reads it

of a book I have not read since high school, which is Oliver's Travels, was that an inspiration

...