Tom Lin, "Babylon, South Dakota" (Little, Brown and Co, 2026)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Introducing Meta Glasses. You have questions, they've got answers.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru?

**Tom Lin** (0:08)
Lima.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:09)
How do you say, where's the restroom in Spanish?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:12)
Dónde está el baño?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:14)
Hey Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich?

**SPEAKER_5** (0:17)
Technically, no. Spiritually, yes.

**Tom Lin** (0:20)
Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?

**SPEAKER_5** (0:23)
That's one of life's biggest questions. What do you think?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:27)
Ask anything with the new Meta Glasses.

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**SPEAKER_1** (1:30)
Welcome to The New Books Network.

**Nicholas Gordon** (1:34)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of The Asian Review of Books podcast done in partnership with The New Books Network. In this podcast, we're going to view fiction and non-fiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region.
Today, we're welcoming novelist Tom Lin back to the show, whose new novel, Babylon, South Dakota moves his fascination with the American West into stranger and more uncanny territory. A Chinese family moves to a new farm in South Dakota. After the government takes an interest in a plot near their home for some Cold War era experiments, the family's life gets much odder and much stranger. Babylon, South Dakota's Cold War era setting gives the novel a chance to explore nuclear dread, government conspiracies, and an interest in the paranormal that's reminiscent of the viral phenomenon, the SCP Foundation. Tom was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Ponoma College, he also holds a PhD from University of California, Davis. His first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Iowa.
Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Maybe we should talk about this book by starting with your previous book, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, and people should go listen to that episode when that book came out a while ago.

**Tom Lin** (2:50)
Thank you for having me on the show.

**Nicholas Gordon** (2:53)
That book was your spin on the traditional Western story. How did you get from The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu to this book, Babylon, South Dakota?

**Tom Lin** (3:02)
Yeah.
It's good to be back. I think the last episode I was on maybe about five years now. I think it's been an eventful little stretch of time since then. The first book is a Western with a Chinese American protagonist. Then this book is about a Chinese American immigrant family. They both take place in wide open spaces. I think the way that I went from the first one to this one is, I was doing my PhD research. I was writing a dissertation on science fiction and the development of nuclear missiles. As a result, I was traveling to all of these missile silos. I was interviewing all these old rocket engineers. I was thinking very deeply about what it meant to live in a world that had been restructured by this absolute power, which is the nuclear missile. I was getting to a point where I just got stuck on my dissertation, just banging my head against a brick wall. I thought rather foolishly now, I thought that I would ease my troubles a bit by starting a new fiction project that I could use whenever I got stuck on one thing, that I could go work on that instead. The result of that, which was fantastic, which was that I had two things that I could get stuck on equally at the same time.
Then I was working on that and at the same time, my grandfather had gotten COVID in 2020, and then he had been in and out of the hospital, slowly declining with each iteration. Around the time that I was working on the book, he was also in his last few months.