Dreams of the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn

I was raised in it - not fan in a capital F - but my parents were both big science fiction geeks. You've been writing for a long time, and I'm curious what your Fandom origin story is - how did you become a fan? This interview has been edited for clarity and length. I blew through the book in a couple of days, and sat down to chat with Vaughn about what I just read, and we got into the weeds on fandom, cosplay, immersive entertainment, and intellectual property.

It's like a book that was crafted and crafted by the finest social media algorithms for me. What I didn't expect was that it was it takes an interesting turn into a lot of the things I use this newsletter to talk about: intellectual property, content creation, originality, fandom, and quite a bit more. It's a book that's earnestly nerdy, thoughtful, and that has a lot to say about the stories we consume. It's like Ready Player One, but not a dumb exposition of all the things Ernest Cline watched once. It's a fun, breezy thriller that's loaded with Easter eggs for everything from Homer's myths to Lord of the Rings to H.P. Think Westworld meets Lord of the Rings.Īddie is recruited because her sketchy fanboy ex is one of a handful of staff members who cut off the island with some sort of invisible shield, and she's tasked with accompanying a quartet of ex-special forces mercenaries who've been hired to wrest control back. I've liked her shorter stories over the years (and interviewed her a handful of times while I was writing at Lightspeed Magazine), but this one particularly spoke to me: a literature professor is recruited by a tech billionaire to help him regain control of a high-tech, fantasy-themed park called Insula Mirabilis, where visitors could live out their wildest dream and favorite stories. That was the case with Carrie Vaughn's latest science fiction novel, Questland. But it's rare that I'll open a book and just pages in, start texting people 'YOU NEED TO READ THIS.' Ask anyone I know, and they'll probably tell you that I've pushed any number of books on them over the years. Carrie Vaughn on tactile escapism, immersive entertainment, and her latest book Questland

Dreams of the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn