Daniel Kraus with Josh Brolin: Angel Down and the Future of Sci-Fi

Daniel Kraus, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Angel Down, joins actor Josh Brolin — the star of Whalefall, which Kraus adapted for the screen from Kraus' 2023 novel — for a conversation about expanding the horizons of literary science fiction — and his new galaxy-spanning adventure, The Sixth Nik.

Following five soldiers sent into No Man’s Land on a rescue mission during WWI, Angel Down chronicles the soldiers’ discovery of not a wounded comrade, but a fallen angel — seemingly blasted from the sky by artillery fire. As fear, greed, jealousy, and paranoia take hold, what begins as a miracle becomes a test of human nature at its most desperate — and what begins as a historical combat story becomes, in Kraus’ hands, “a thunderous gallop of a war novel, a new classic, a best-in-class example of speculative fiction” (The New York Times Book Review).

Kraus has long been one of the great genre alchemists of contemporary fiction. With Guillermo del Toro, he coauthored The Shape of Water, the basis of the Oscar-winning film — a modern fable of monstrosity, beauty, and desire that helped bring new contours to speculative storytelling. In Angel Down, The Sixth Nik, and Whalefall — for which Kraus co-wrote the screenplay — Kraus shows what the fantastical can reveal about human nature, history, and the nature of reality itself.

Don’t miss this conversation with a new standard-bearer of speculative fiction — a writer using the supernatural not as escapist fantasy, but as a way into the deepest chambers of violence, faith, and human longing.

“A bold, utterly propulsive masterpiece.” — Eric LaRocca