Subverting Sci-fi & the Electric Pull of the Frontier

An electricity thief and a family farm disrupted by a missile silo anchor two novels exploring technology, land and the American experience. Hernan Diaz and Tom Lin discuss their work Sunday, November 22 at the Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus auditorium in downtown Miami, as part of Miami Book Fair. Set centuries in the future, Diaz’s Ply follows an orphan who grows up stealing electricity for the black market and encounters a scientific invention that could change reality. The novel considers technology’s role in a society developing new relationships with nature and one another. Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for Trust; his earlier novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Lin’s Babylon, South Dakota centers on a Chinese American family whose farm becomes the site of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers missile silo. As construction proceeds, strange changes emerge: the wife develops the ability to foresee events, and the garden’s chrysanthemums become seemingly indestructible. Lin’s debut, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Clay Smith, literary director of the San Antonio Book…