Today’s guest authors both created believable fictional universes — one gothic, one of a dystopian future. We’ll discuss what it takes to bring realism into fiction to help readers suspend their disbelief.

Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent delivers us into 1893 London, where an intrepid amateur naturalist sets out to prove a mythical, murderous beast, is actually an undiscovered species.  Sarah has turned her PhD in creative writing into a burgeoning career as a novelist, with The Essex Serpent, her second novel, winning the British Book Awards Book of the Year. 

Our second author, Christopher Brown, takes us into a haunting future where the United States has broken into warring territories and the center of the landmass is a ravaged wasteland known as the Tropic of Kansas.  Christopher is a lawyer and renowned short story writer whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.