Podcast: Talking about Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, on A Meal of Thorns

I've made no secret of my admiration for Ancillary Review of Books's podcast A Meal of Thorns. In every episodes, host Jake Cassella Brookins invites a guest—an author, critic, or academic—to discuss a single book. Selections range across genres (a recent episode focused on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep), discussing books new and old, famous and obscure. I guested on A Meal of Thorns last year with a discussion of Iain M. Banks's Excession, and Cassella was kind enough to invite me back in 2026. This time our topic was David Mitchell's 2004 breakout success Cloud Atlas, a novel in which six nested narratives, set in different time periods and written in different styles and genres, reveal unexpected connections, as well as a meditation on humanity's tendency towards cruelty and exploitation.

As I say at the beginning of the episode, it is by no means an exaggeration to say that Cloud Atlas was one of the novels that made me. It's a book I discovered around the time that I was starting to explore genres outside of the fantastic, as well as the capabilities of literary fiction. Mitchell's masterful handling of different genres, as well as his interweaving of the separate stories, opened my eyes to the possibilities of not just that genre-mixing approach, but of playful, experimental writing more generally. Nor was I alone in finding Cloud Atlas a revelatory experience. As Cassella and I discuss, it is probably one of the most influential novels of the 21st century, and a harbinger of many of the ways in which we now regard (and ignore) genre boundaries.

I had a lot to say about Cloud Atlas, and Cassella was kind enough to just let me cook. One of the things I ended up talking about—under the heading "my unified theory of Cloud Atlas"—is how genres as storytelling modes, and genres as marketing categories, are often set in opposition even as they affect and inflect each other. Cloud Atlas emerged from a moment in which the idea of combining literary fiction with genre writing was both unthinkable, and increasingly urgent, and yet much of what it innovated has since been commercialized and commodified. It's a testament to the book's strength that despite this fact, I still found it fresh and invigorating, and enjoyed my return to it immensely. Talking about it with Cassella was just as fun, and I hope you enjoy listening to the episode.

If, like me, you appreciate A Meal of Thorns, and the Ancillary Review of Books for producing it, you might be interested to know that the magazine will soon be launching its 2026 Kickstarter, with the goal of becoming "a paying market, a federal nonprofit, and a model for progressive, collaborative publishing". The Kickstarter should be launching later today, and I hope you can consider donating to support excellent SFF criticism.

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