A Meal of Thorns – Details, episodes & analysis

The pleasures and perils of nostalgia & reference, the importance of identifying real play versus gamified labor, and whether the internet used to be fun: Matthew Leggat of the Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast joins to discuss Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Matthew Leggatt
• Title: Ready Player One by Ernie Cline
• Host:Jake Casella Brookins
• Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork byRob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• ARB’s Fundraiser!!!
• Matthew’s Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror, Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, and Wastelands and Wonderlands
• The Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• Chicano Frankenstein by Daniel A. Olivas
• U&DF episode with Olivas
• Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash & Reamde
• William Gibson’s Neuromancer
• K.A. Teryna’s Black Hole Heart translated by Alex Shvartsman
• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya’s Chain Gang All-Stars
• Was It Yesterday: Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television edited by Matthew
• Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
• Gamergate
• “Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel, and the Geeky ‘Canon’ of White Masculinity” by Megan Amber Condis
• Captain Crunch: phreaker John Draper
• Kyle Chayka’s "Why the internet isn't fun anymore"
• William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”
• Ling Ma's Severance
• Helen MacDonald & Syn Blaché’s Prophet
• MacDonald’s H is for Hawk
• Stanislaw Lem's Solaris
• Alice Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture
• The television series Stranger Things
• Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life
• Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (based on Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!) & Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb
• Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
• B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two
• Voight-Kampf Test from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner / Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• The "lusory attitude" from Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia
• Ernst Callenbach's Ecotopia
• Philip Nel’s “I Love the ‘80s: Dystopia, Nostalgia, and Ready Player One”
• Michael Jackson
• 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back
• (That's Mike Nelson of MST3K Fame)
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
• Jordan Carroll's Speculative Whiteness
• Paul Hardisty'sForcing trilogy

A nested novel that very pointedly bridges the litfic/specfic divide, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas takes some big swings at tricky topics. Abigail Nussbaum returns to the podcast with some thoughts on how the novel has aged, and how it’s still relevant to genre thinking today.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Abigail Nussbaum
• Title: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• Host:Jake Casella Brookins
• Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork byRob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• ARB’s Fundraiser!!!
• Track Changes
• Aliya Whiteley’s The Misheard World & Abigail’s review
• Nina Allen
• Alexis Hall's Hell's Heart
• Olivia Waite
• Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
• Lincoln Michel's Metallic Realms
• Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
• Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees
• Readerville forum & Salon Magazine's “The Well”
• The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan
• Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape & Motherless Brooklyn
• Kate Atkinson's Case Histories
• Our episode on The Historian
• Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
• New Wave, Cyberpunk, Mundane SF, The New Weird
• China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station
• The “New Adult” category of books
• Taylor Jenkins Reed
• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe
• Aragorn’s Tax Policy
• Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending
• Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
• Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
• Jean Baudrillard
• William Gibson
• The Stanford marshmallow experiment
• The Chatham Islands, Moriori & Māori peoples
• Charlie Jane Anders’ piece on Cloud Atlas
• The Velvet Underground joke (not many people listened, but everybody who did started a band)
• Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
• Niall Harrison’s “In Search of Green Overshoots”
• The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift
• In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
• Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
• Abigail's Blog & Bluesky
• Tolkien Series: Roseanna Pendlebury & Ed Morland’s, Ranged Touch’s Shelved by Genre, Nick Hubble, Jared Pechaček, Weird Studies

Academic, critic, and prolific podcaster Cameron Kunzelman joins for a far-ranging discussion about how climate fiction, science fiction, and personal and political connections to the environment intersect. Bonus hog sighting.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Cameron Kunzelman
• Title: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
• Host:Jake Casella Brookins
• Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork byRob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Ranged Touch podcasts
• The World is Born From Zero & Everything is Permitted
• Sean McTiernan’s SFUltra (Sean was the guest for our Dreams of Amputation episode)
• From Hell by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell
• Steve Moore's Somnium
• Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism
• Christopher Brown's A Natural History of Empty Lots
• Bill Bryson
• Abigail Nussbaum
• Vajra Chandrasekera's Rakesfall
• Michael Crichton
• Donna J. Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble
• Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future & Aurora (episode on the latter with Hilary Strang)
• Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock, Seveneves, & Anathem
• Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
• Nicholas Meyer’s film The Day After
• Nevil Shute's On the Beach
• Adam McKay’s film Don't Look Up
• Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects
• Trinitite
• Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang
• Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan
• “30-50 Feral Hogs”
• Clock of the Long Now
• Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
• John Christopher’s The Death of Grass / No Blade of Grass
• Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa
• Describe World
• Flannery O'Connor
• Deep ecology
• Arne Næss
• Ted Kaczynski
• #NoDAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline)
• Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net
• Patrick Wright’s The Village That Died For England
• Centralia coal-seam fire in Pennsylvania
• Keiichiro Toyama’s Silent Hill & Christophe Gans’ film adaptation
• Cameron's Bluesky
• The Assassin's Creed franchise
• Immanuel Velikovsky
• Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods

Vampire scholar, science fiction studies editor, and ARB co-founder Sean Guynes joins to discuss Kostova’s 2005 historical vampire thriller. We both have fairly negative opinions of the book, but it did lead us to talk about what historical thrillers are (or are not) theorizing, vampire novels we like more, and much else besides.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Sean Guynes
• Title: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• David Linday’s Voyage to Arcturus
• Sean's series on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books
• Thomas Burnett Swann
• E.R. Eddison
• Gibson's Bridge trilogy
• Stephen Norrington’s film Blade
• Bram Stoker's Dracula
• Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
• R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis
• Sarah Perry's Melmoth and our episode with Jon Greenaway about it
• Ilana Masad’s “Holocaust Beach Reads”
• Machiavelli's The Prince
• Radu Florescu & Raymond McNally's In Search of Dracula
• The Turkey City Lexicon
• Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, including Memnoch the Devil
• Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape
• Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germaine cycle
• E. Elias Merhige’s film Shadow of the Vampire
• Claire Kohda's Woman, Eating
• Indrapramit Das's The Devourers
• Stephen Graham Jones' The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
• Peter S. Beagle's A Fine and Private Place
• Eddison's the The Mezentian Gate

And be sure to check out Sean’s essay on The Historian!

Writer, scholar, and academic organizer E.F. McAdam joins to talk about human evolution & extinction, AI, pseudo-science, and much more in Kawakami’s very strange and really quite funny far-future novel.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Eleanor McAdam
• Title: Under The Eye Of The Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Current Research in Science Fiction
• Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
• Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
• Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent and Some Desperate Glory
• Niall Harrison’s Locus review of Under The Eye Of The Big Bird
• Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model
• J.G. Ballard
• Stephen Baxter's Evolution
• William Hope Hogdson's The Night Land
• X-Men
• Isaac Asimov's Foundation
• Margaret Atwood MaddAddam Trilogy
• Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Cat's Cradle
• Erika Swyler's We Lived On The Horizon
• Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun & Never Let Me Go
• Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time

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Barthelme’s surreal, post-modern writing was massively influential for the short story market and for evolving conceptions of literary realism and irrealism, but he’s not often discussed in speculative circles. Author & teacher Timothy Moore is on to help rectify that: we dig into some of our favorites from this landmark connection, with lots of spitballing about the limits of interpretation.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Timothy Moore
• Title: 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Timothy Moore’s I Will Teach You Retribution
• Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock & Peter Weir’s film adaptation
• Molly Templeton’s Bluesky request for Australian Gothic
• “Intermittent Anhedonia”
• Ethan Rutherford's North Sun
• Evening House Books
• "The School"
• Close Reading for the 21st Century edited by Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant
• Alduous Huxley’s Brave New World
• "The Lottery"
• "Me and Miss Mandible"
• "A Shower of Gold"
• "Eugénie Grandet"
• Sidney Lumet’s Network
• "The Balloon"
• "The Great Hug"
• We somehow completely failed to reference E.E. Cumming’s “In Just – spring” for balloon-man reasons
• Keita Takahashi's Katamari Damacy
• Ub Iwerk’s Balloon Land
• Will McMahon
• “A Manual for Sons”
• Barthelme’s The Dead Father
• Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic
• "The Policeman's Ball"
• Vercingetorix
• "The King of Jazz"
• Julio Cortázar
• Ishmael Reed
• Kelly Link
• Ed Park
• Elwin Cotman
• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
• Aimee Bender's Girl in the Flammable Skirt
• George Saunders
• Garielle Lutz
• Dalkey Archives
• Small Beer Press
• Zachary Gillan &  our Authority episode
• “Reading Weird Fiction in a Time of Fascism”
• Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter
• Liliana Costanzi’s You Glow in the Dark
• Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons
• Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis
• Brian Evenson
• “Lonely Rolling Star” by Saki Kabata and Yoshihito Yano off the first Katamari game
• Billy Bletcher as the Pincushion Man in Ub Iwerks’ Balloon Land, music by Carl Staling
• “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” recorded by Miff Mole and His Little Molers
• “Perdido Street Blues” by Louis Armstrong and Sydney Bechet
• Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce”

Combining cyberpunk, space opera, and a strong interest in artistic creation and gaming, Burning Bright is an unusual SF novel from a very specific era. Author Ursula Whitcher joins us to talk about the novel’s many strange facets, its fascination with endings, and its connections to developments elsewhere in gaming and science fiction.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Ursula Whitcher
• Title: Burning Bright by Melissa Scott
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• North Continent Ribbon
• Indra Das’s The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar
• Fonda Lee's Green Bone books & game thereof w/ James Mendez Hodes
• Bruce Coville's Aliens Ate My Homework & Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher
• Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons
• Scott’s Trouble And Her Friends & Astreiant series, most recently Point of Hearts
• C.S. Lewis's Perelandra
• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance novels
• Don Daglow’s Neverwinter Nights
• Commedia dell'arte
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise
• LAN parties
• C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner books
• Arkardy Martine's Teixcalaan books
• Iain M. Banks' Player of Games
• Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
• Cameron Reed's Fortunate Fall
• Iain Softley’s Hackers
• William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy
• Charlie Jane Anders
• Bruce Sterling
• Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide
• Ursula's website & Bluesky

Fresh off the release of her book Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Author of Color, Joy Sanchez-Taylor joins the podcast to discuss Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, a landmark book in SFF. Lots to talk about here: in terms of how the entire trilogy is tackling ideas about race and oppression, Jemisin’s approach to structure and genre categories, and The Fifth Season’s significance and ongoing legacy.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Joy Sanchez-Taylor
• Title: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Author of Color
• Routledge Handbook of Co-Futurisms
• Dispelling Fantasies: Author of Color Re-Imagine a Genre
• Ibi Zoboi's Skin
• Examples of YA novels in verse from the Boston Public Library
• Liliana Colanzi You Glow in the Dark, translated by Chris Andrews
• Center for Fiction Brooklyn
• Puppygate
• Jemisin’s 2018 Hugo Acceptance Speech
• Sylvia Moreno Garcia, Nnedi Okorafor, Nghi Vo
• Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy, The City We Became
• Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone
• Moses Ose Utomi’s The Lies of the Ajungo
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
• Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series
• The Elder Scrolls games Morrowind & Skyrim
• Jemisin on race in Skyrim
• Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf
• Latinx Visions Conference, Nov 3-7
• Marianna Enriquez
• Ananda Lima's Craft
• Colson Whitehead, Amal El-Mohtar
• Nghi Vo's Singing Hills & The City In Glass
• Joy’s Bluesky
• Suzan Palumbo, Zig Zag Claybourne
• VICFA
• World Fantasy Convention

Picking the second book as an entry point into Area X, weird scholar and normal ARB editor Zachary Gillan is on the pod to talk about Jeff VanderMeer’s work and how the New Weird is more than just ecological anxiety. (Though it might be that, too.)

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

• Guest: Zachary Gillan
• Title: Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Zach’s Profane Illuminations column at ARB
• Robert Aickman
• Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book-Censor's Library, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman & Sawad Hussain
• Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud A Solitude, translated by Michael Henry Heim
• Annihilation, Acceptance, and Absolution
• VanderMeer’s blog
• VanderMeer’s Ambergris: City of Saints and Madmen; Shriek: An Afterword; Finch
• Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
• MKUltra
• Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (from Jean-Michel Jasiensko’s French translation) and Bill Johnston (from the Polish)
• Boris & Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, translated by Olena Bormashenko
• Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker
• Alex Garland's Annihilation
• Cormac McCarthy's The Road
• Kay Chronister's Desert Creatures
• Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow
• Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers
• Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski’s Batman: the Animated Series
• Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology and other work
• VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander
• Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons
• Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain

Casella heads to Seattle for the World Science Fiction Convention, reporting on his travels and the convention. Includes interviews with Worldcon guests & conrunners, thoughts on the Hugos and the event, and, of course, a quick coffee report.

Credits:

• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle
• The Hugo Awards
• Norwescon
• Kevin Black - Publications Division Head
• Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
• "Full Moon" by the Black Ghosts
• Article about John Anderson’s Beachcomber Museum, with link to the short documentary
• Dr. Kaitlyn Casimo
• The Allen Institute
• Brandon O'Brien - Poet Laureate for the Seattle Worldcon
• The Speculative Poetry Initiative
• Interstellar Flight Press
• The Translated Hugo Initiative
• “Summit Sound” by the Jack Straw Cultural Center
• “Mole” by Elizabeth McQueen
• “What You have become” by Kate Clark
• Olympia Coffee Roasting
• The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
• Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• 99% Invisible readalong of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker
• Hugos There
• Hugo Girl!
• Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll
• Abigail Nussbaum
• SFPoetry.org
• Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Asimov’s, Analog

Calypso by Oliver K. Langmead