For our very first WIRED Book Club livestream, Kate Knibbs will be joined by the author of, Carlos Barragán. Barragán, a journalist and researcher at, flew to Lagos to embed himself with a group of young, desperate grifters. The account he brings back is a funny, sad, enraging read about how the internet can fuel heartbreak. She also leads WIRED Book Club . He was formerly a reporter at El Confidencial before receiving his MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. is his first book.

Here at WIRED Book Club, we tend to read newer writers. Since publishing his first short story, "Tower of Babylon," in 1990, he's averaged less than a story a year, quietly cultivating a modest but devoted fan base that recognizes his work for what it is: sharp, spare, intensely thought-through science fiction. "Literary," as some like to call it. And that probably wouldn't have changed, had it not been for the release last year of Arrival, Denis Villeneuve's lovely meditation on time and psycholinguistics. Widely celebrated as cerebral, meaningful sci-fi, it sent people flocking to the source material--a Chiang short called "Story of Your Life," published in 1998 (well before the Internet and 1D corrupted that phrase).

You might think that every choice a writer makes is highly deliberate, part of a grand master plan that only she is entirely aware of. We certainly felt that way while reading Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie's award-winning sci-fi novel about a spaceship AI that gets trapped in a single body and seeks revenge on her enemies. There are so many details embedded in the world-building--from a fixation on gloves and tea to the use of "she" for all genders--that Leckie surely had reams of unpublished backstory (or at least a yarn chart) to explain and keep track of it all. But as we found out in our WIRED Book Club conversation with the author, Leckie takes a far less structured approach when it comes to creating new universes. Was this series always a trilogy in your mind? Though I'm not sure why, to be honest.

Good science fiction requires close reading. That's what we're discovering as we embark on Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, the first book in her Imperial Radch trilogy. Not only are most gender pronouns "she," but Leckie isn't exactly generous with her world-building--she holds back on explanation in favor of letting readers do the work. Which is, of course, great for our purposes. Read up on our thoughts below, then join us in the comments for further discussion.