George Saunders, 63, is a rare type of dude: He writes weird stuff that people actually read. His 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo was narrated by a roiling crew of literal, often incomprehensible ghosts. It won The Booker Prize. He happily glides through genres, not so much discarding their rules as making it abundantly clear he never cared to learn those rules in the first place. In 2006, the magazine Guernica asked Saunders about his relationship to one of his go-to genres, science fiction. "I didn't really read a lot of it when I was young," Saunders answered, then launched into an emotionally charged reminiscence of watching the first Star Wars and seeing the "ships fly over your head" and noting "that they're all kind of junked up on the bottom.