Each year, we sit down and look at the year ahead and, inevitably, end up discussing the books we are looking forward to. This year we invited long time friends of the podcast Charlie Jane Anders and Ian Mond to join us.

During a lively conversation it became clear that, no matter what else is happening in the world, there's a lot of wonderful work coming out in 2025, and this only scratches the surface of it.

As always, our thanks to Charlie Jane and Ian for making the time to join us.

As promised, here are our lists.

Charlie Jane Anders

1. Oathbound, Tracy Deonn
2. Harriet Tubman Live in Concert, Bob the Drag Queen
3. Terms of Service, Ciel Pierlot
4. Notes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman
5. Meet Me at the Crossroads, Megan Giddings
6. Harmattan Season, Tochi Onyebuchi

Ian Mond

1. Waterblack, Alex Pheby
2. The Crimson Road,  A. G. Slatter
3. Exit Zero, Marie-Helene Bertino
4. Major Arcana, John Pistelli
5. The Antidote, Karen Russell

Gary K. Wolfe

1. Written on the Dark, Guy Gavriel Kay
2. When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory
3. A Granite Silence, Nina Allan
4. Frankenstein Rex, Adam Roberts
5. Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders

Jonathan

1. Luminous, Silvia Park
2. Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou
3. The Devils, Joe Abercrombie
4. The Everlasting, Alix E Harrow
5. All That We See or Seem, Ken Liu

For those who might have been hoping our 2025 podcasts might get a little more focused and coherent, our apologies. Following up on several discussions on social media about how to learn about overlooked but deserving novels (mostly fantasy), we speculate on the factors that help a book or author gain and keep some sort of traction. Reprint programs like the Gollancz Masterworks or Tor Essentials might help, but we mention a handful of authors who have written wonderful work that is worth a fresh look, including Tanith Lee, Michael Bishop, Lisa Goldstein, Tim Powers, Michael Moorcock, Graham Joyce, and others. We also touch upon the notion of formula in SF and fantasy, and end with some of our current reading.

For our first October episode, we try out another new opening, touch upon the recent catastrophic weather in Florida and the hazards of attempting near future SF in a rapidly changing world, with Norman Spinrad’s Russian Spring as one example.

After a brief digression (what else?) on novels that extrapolate political decisions more than technological change—like the two novels that preceded the movie Dr. Strangelove, we touch upon the question of whether J.G. Ballard may catch the current zeitgeist in the same way Philp K. Dick did a generation ago.

Finally, a few more short digressions on whether awards like World Fantasy can significantly influence a book's sales or reputation, on the value of “best of” anthologies, and on what makes a good gift book for the forthcoming holiday season.

After reminding listeners that the deadline for Hugo nominations is fast approaching on March 15 (and reminding them once again of the eligibility of this podcast for Best Fancast and of Jonathan for Best Editor, Short Form), we move on to the much-discussed, record-setting Brandon Sanderson Kickstarter, and the question of whether it really matters to anyone other than Sanderson and his readers. Acknowledging that Sanderson readers are fully likely to get exactly what they are expecting, this led us into a brief discussion of reader expectations, also the topic of a recent essay by Molly Templeton on Tor.com. While occasionally we come across a book with almost no prior knowledge or publicity, most books come with expectations based on the author’s previous work, or even the publisher’s reputation.

Some of the authors discussed here, and some that Jonathan and Gary are currently reading or expecting to read, include Guy Gavriel Kay, R.F. Kuang, Kelly Barnhill, Nghi Vo, John Crowley, and Karen Joy Fowler. At the end, we touch briefly upon the question of history in fiction, and the different strategies of using entirely fictional characters, almost entirely historical figures, or a mixture of both.

This week, in our more-or-less annual discussion of the Locus Recommended Reading List, we are delighted to be joined by Locus Editor-in-Chief Liza Groen Trombi.

We talk about the purpose of the list, how it has changed over the years, how books or stories get on the list, and a few thorny questions about how to decide whether a novel is SF or fantasy if it contains substantial elements of both. In addition to mentioning some of our own favourite works of the year, we touch upon the importance of the First Novels list, which might be a harbinger of what's to come, and how story collections and YA novels have grown in importance over the years.

Toward the end, we pay a brief tribute to two Locus Magazine pioneers, reviewer Faren Miller (who was also the magazine's first full-time employee), and bibliographer William G. Contento, who helped establish resources that remain crucial to anyone interested in the SFF field.

This week (episode 3 of season 13) we return to our tradition of almost entirely unstructured rambling. Jonathan and Gary consider such questions as to whether a novel can be good SF, but not much good in literary terms, or a good literary novel not much good as SF.

While we recognize that many popular subgenres, from military SF to heroic fantasy, have plenty of readers loyal to the old traditions, we muse about whether many of today’s writers feel some pressure to meet both traditional literary and SF standards, and Jonathan namechecks R.F. Kuang. Some writers we mention, such as Arkady Martine, seem to effortlessly do both. On the other hand, why were several genre mystery readers of the 1930s and 1940s, like Hammett and Chandler, were later recognized as major literary figures, the same didn’t seem to have to SF writers of the same period.

Toward the end, we touch upon Paul Kincaid's provocative new essay, "A Taxonomy of Reviewing" and his book on Brian W. Aldiss, amongst other things. 

As always, we hope you enjoy the episode. 

This week Jonathan and Gary are back, a little early, to talk about the annual science fiction calendar, the awards season, how there are so many awards, what books they’re reading, and what books they’ve worked on.  Oh, and for a short moment, they touch on movies and TV too.

All in all, episode two of season 13, sounds pretty much like most of the other episodes we've recorded over the past twelve years, so if they were your jam, this might be too. 

As always, we hope you enjoy it and are very grateful to everyone for listening in...

Welcome to The Coode Street Podcast. With 2021 barely in the rearview mirror, it's time to kick off season 13 with a brand new episode. A little over a month ago we sat down with James Bradley, Alix E. Harrow, and Ian Mond to discuss 2021: The Year in Review in Episode 568. At the end of that chat, we all said we'd back to discuss the books we're looking forward to in 2022, and here we are!

This week we discuss 25 or so books that we are looking forward to or, maybe, have read already and can recommend that you check out (along with a few strays). Pre-order links are below. We also are clear we've definitely missed books we'll end up loving.

As always, our sincere thanks to James, Alix, and Ian for making time to chat with us.  We hope you enjoy the episode and that you'll see us again in a couple weeks.

JAMES

1. The Candy House, Jennifer Egan
2. To Paradise, Hanya Yanigihara
3. Goliath, Tochi Onyebuchi
4. Sea of Tranquility, Emily St John Mandel
5. A History of Dreams, Jane Rawson

ALIX

1. Siren Queen, Nghi Vo
2. Saint Death's Daughter, C.S.E. Cooney
3. How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
4. Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
5. Spear, Nicola Griffith

IAN

1. The This, Adam Roberts
2. Dark Breakers, C.S.E Cooney
3. The Last Blade Priest, Will Wiles
4. Booth, Karen Joy Fowler
5. Hard Places(1), Kirstyn McDermott

JONATHAN

1. The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, Felix Salten (trans. Jack Zipes)
2. Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution,  R.F. Kuang
3. The Landing, Mary Gentle
4. All the Seas of the World, Guy Gavriel Kay
5. Devil House, John Darnielle

1. A Mirror Mended, Alix E. Harrow
2. Aspects, John M. Ford
3. High Times in the Low Parliament, Kelly Robson
4. The Daughter of Dr. Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
5. Boys, Beasts, and Men, Sam J. Miller

(1) Pre-order not yet available.

The Coode Street Podcast kicked off in May 2010.  Over the next 568 episodes Jonathan and Gary, and far too many friends of the podcast to be named here individually, talked about a shared love of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in all of their many forms. 

Just a week ago, the members of the World Science Fiction Convention awarded the Coode Street Podcast with the Hugo Award for Best Fancast.  This time out we take a moment, on the very edge of the holidays, to say thank you. Thank you to everyone out there involved, no matter how small or how large your contribution to our ongoing conversation. We will ever be in deeply in your debt for your support.

We'll be back in 2022, but for now we'd like to wish you a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season and a thoroughly magical New Year. See you again soon!

The holiday season is upon us, another strange, unforgettable year is almost done, and here at Coode Street it's time for our annual gift guide/year in review, where we recommend some books we loved during the year.

This time out we invited special guests and good friends James Bradley, Alix E. Harrow, and Ian Mond to join us to recommend just a few of the books we'd loved the most during 2021. Perhaps more than in any other year, this was a time when we all were almost surprised at how much great reading we found.

Because this is Coode Street, traditions are traditions and we had some technical issues. All is good for most of the hour of the recording, but there's a jump or two towards the end. We hope you'll excuse this, and that the recommendations will prove of interest.

As always, our thanks to Alix, James, and Ian for making time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the podcast and that the guide is of some use. To help, the recommendations are below. And we're in talks to maybe return in January for a books we're looking forward to chat as well...

James Bradley recommended:

• Jennifer Mills, The Airways
• Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book
• Nina Allan, The Good Neighbours
• Olga Ravn, The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

and also mentioned:

• Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun
• Laura Jean McKay, The Animals in That Country
• Marion Engel, Bear
• Garth Nix, Terciel and Elinor
• Sim Kern, Depart, Depart
• Hari Kunzru, Red Pill

Alix E. Harrow recommended:

• Lee Mandelo, Summer Sons
• Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun
• Ava Reid, The Wolf and the Woodsman
• Nghi Vo, The Chosen and the Beautiful

And I also loved/mentioned/endorsed:

• Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built Angela Slatter, All the Murmuring Bones

Ian Mond recommended:

• Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith
• The Thing Between Us, Gus Moreno
• The Confessions of Copeland Cane, Keenan Norris
• All the Murmuring Bones, Angela Slatter
• Dead Souls, Sam Rivière
• The Angels of L19, Jonathan Walker
• Mrs Death: Misses Death, Salena Godden
• The Employees, Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken)

Jonathan recommended:

• The Hood, Lavie Tidhar
• A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers
• The Wisdom of Crowds, Joe Abercrombie

and passingly mentioned The Detective Up Late by Adrian McKinty.

Gary recommended:

• Karin Tidbeck, The Memory Theatre
• M. Rickert, The Shipbuilder of Belfairie
• E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves
• Nina Allan, The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories
• P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn

Pus a couple of titles that were also on other folks’ lists, like The Hood and The Chosen and the Beautiful.

Welcome to episode 25 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary sit down with the very talented and extremely busy Sheree Renée Thomas to discuss her award-winning collection Nine Bar Blues, her first year editing the venerable Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the lasting impact of her Dark Matter anthologies, her forthcoming anthologies Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue (co-edited with Pan Morrigan and Troy L. Wiggins) and Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction (co-edited with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight, her own experiences growing up as an SF and horror reader, and the new age of recognizing African and African diaspora SFF.  It’s a pretty lively conversation.

As always, our sincere thanks to Sheree Renée Thomas, and we hope you enjoy the episode.

Order now!

Welcome to episode 24 of Season 12 of the Coode Street Podcast. As the year draws to a close and winter comes to Chicago and summer to Perth, Gary and Jonathan sit down for an unexpected and unplanned conversation about life achievement awards and their meaningfulness, a brief foreshadowing of a discussion about interrogating the sociopolitical assumptions of a work of fiction, and more.

This time out there were a few technical issues in the final five minutes of the recording, but those have hopefully been addressed by editing. Two episodes remain in the season - a good time to be discussing the year in review and the best fiction of 2021 - before we go on hiatus, but for now we hope you enjoy the episode!

Welcome to episode 23 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week, after a brief and mostly irrelevant discussion of whether the proposition that Ray Bradbury as the quintessential October writer means anything at all outside North America, Jonathan and Gary actually try to focus on an important question: whether posthumous publications actually do anything to enhance an author’s reputation.

We make distinctions between works that the author clearly wanted to be published (like Philip K. Dick final four novels), works that the author clearly did not intend for publication (like some late Heinlein manuscripts), and works which the author may or may not have tried to publish during their lifetimes (such as a number of R.A. Lafferty manuscripts completed or continued by other hands, including novels by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Robert Jordan, and Terry Pratchett). We even touch upon whether the J. Michael Straczynski The Last Dangerous Visions is a useful idea decades after Harlan Ellison began the project. Do author's estates see posthumous publication as a means of keeping an author’s name alive, as a purely commercial proposition, or as a way of arguing for an author’s canonical status? Other authors touched upon include J.R.R. Tolkien, John M. Ford, Philip José Farmer, and even a few examples from mainstream fiction, such as John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, which won a Pulitzer Prize more than a decade after its author's death.

As always, we hope you enjoy the episode.

As we gear up for the inevitable year-in-review discussions, and the annual semi-hiatus between the fall and spring convention sessions (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), we return to our familiar questions of canon and influence, noting that while some books seem to drop out of the discussion within months of being published, others,like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, continue to generate responses despite controversy. 

From that, we not-quite-seamlessly segue into a discussion of Harlan Ellison and J. Michael Straczynski’s The Last Dangerous Visions and the problems in presenting stories over 50 years old together with brand-new tales, finally chatting about what makes you want to recommend a book to a friend. 

Along with way, we mention several interesting writers, including Emily Tesh, Wole Talabi, and Kate Heartfield.

Welcome to episode 22 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. In this episode, Gary and Jonathan talk to Oghenechovwe Ekpeki, author of the Otherwise Award-winning and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, British SF Award, and Nebula Award-nominated novella "Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon", editor of The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction, and co-editor with Zelda K. Knight of the British Fantasy Award-winning anthology Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora. 

Oghenechovwe joins us from Lagos, Nigeria to discuss growing up reading speculative fiction in Nigeria, his hopes for The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction series, the challenges facing writers from Africa to get a chance to be a part of the international science fiction community, his upcoming anthology African Risen for Tordotcom (co-edited with Sheree Renee Thomas and Zelda K. Knight), and much more.

While there are, later in the podcast, a few moments where static affected our Skype connection, we hope you'll bear with the episode. As always, we'd like to thank Oghenechovwe for taking the time to talk to us, and hope that you enjoy the episode.

Available for order now:

Welcome to episode 21 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast.Once again, it's just Jonathan and Gary, talking about the various roles anthologies have played in the history of science fiction and how that role may be different these days, the nominees and winners of the 2021 Ignyte Awards from FIYAHCON 2021, N.K. Jemisin being named as one of Time Magazine's top 100 most influential people, how SF has begun to shift its historical perspective in terms of colonialism and international literatures, new media adaptations of Asimov and Herbert, and, as always, how genre and other barriers are breaking down and how neither of us is quite keeping up with all the fascinating new fiction published every month, suggesting that maybe 2021 is turning out to be a pretty exciting year.

Welcome to episode 20 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. It's just Jonathan and Gary again, eventually circling around an interesting question raised by Andrew Liptak in Transfer Orbit concerning the question of reading the right book at the right time, rather than being chained to the constant parade of new books and their publicity cycles.

Along the way we pause to note the recent passing of Erle Korshak, one of the last survivors of 1930s fandom; the value and hazards of re-reading old favorites from Gene Wolfe to Dune; the way to arrange stories in an anthology or collection; some newer books by Lavie Tidhar, Joe Abercrombie, and others; the importance of context in reviewing, and, inspired by Matt Bell's My Le Guin Year: Craft Lessons from a Master on Tor.com, how Ursula Le Guin got some things right long before anyone else did, with her own Tehanu. In other words, our usual laser-like focus on whatever comes up in the moment.

As always, we hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome to episode 19 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This time out, Jonathan and Gary return, sans guests or much of a plan. They do manage to touch upon a number of significant issues, such as the work of newly minted World Fantasy Life Achievement winner Howard Waldrop, whether Waldrop could be viewed as a regional author (a Texan in particular), and which other writers might be thought of a representing particular regional voices (R.A. Lafferty, Andy Duncan, Christopher Rowe,  Daryl Gregory?), and how regional voice may show up even in the work of hard SF writers like Gregory Benford. This leads into a more general discussion of influences. Are films based on Philip K. Dick now more influential than Dick’s novels themselves? How are innovative writers like Greg Egan (who just turned 60) and Ted Chiang seen as influential?

This leads, somehow, into a discussions of how writers like Dick, Lovecraft, Le Guin, Octavia Butler made it into the Library of America, and finally to the importance of international and regional anthologies such as Oghenchovwe Donald Ekpeki’s new Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. As always, we also touch upon what we’re reading this week.

Welcome to episode 18 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This time out, Jonathan and Gary are joined by the wonderful Arkady Martine, author of the Hugo-winning A Memory Called Empire and its equally remarkable sequel A Desolation Called Peace. We touch upon how her research as an academic historian helped shape her fiction, the various meanings of empire (and the comparative virtues of SF and fantasy in dealing with such concepts), growing up with a houseful of SF classics from Asimov to Zelazny, and her own current work—including the possibility of more stories set in the Teixcalaanli universe and a likely venture into near-future SF.

As always, our thanks to Arkady for making the time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the episode!

Welcome to episode 17 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. For those very few of you who might be wondering what Jonathan and Gary ramble on about when they’re not recording or talking to guests, here's a taste—especially if you make it all the way to the last ten minutes or so, when we end up talking about our vaccination cards and possible travel plans.  

Before we get there, however, we touch upon the new Lavie Tidhar novel The Hood, which we’re both in the midst of reading and is due out in October. That leads to a broader discussion of Tidhar's work and an even broader discussion about how historical material is handled differently in fantasy from the way it is in SF, and whether the classic view of SF’s manifest destiny even holds up anymore, given the variety of voices and perspectives now available.

Some of the authors we touch upon are Arkady Martine, John Varley, C.J. Cherryh, Isaac Asimov (and the forthcoming Apple TV+ series derived from the Foundation series), Kelly Robson, John Varley, and a few others. A mixed bag, for sure.

Welcome to episode 16 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week, Jonathan and Gary chat with the marvellous M. Rickert, whose new novel The Shipbuilder of Bellfaerie is out next week from Undertow Publications.

We touch upon how the novel draws from traditions as varied as nautical legends, mysteries, and even Frankenstein, and on  the virtues and challenges of the novel as a form compared to novellas and short fiction, the importance of letting the reader use their own imaginations, whether or not M. Rickert fiction is horror fiction (depending, of course, on how horror is defined), whether a reader missing the point is really such a bad thing, and some earlier classic M. Rickert stories like “The Chambered Fruit,” “Bread and Bombs,” and “The Mothers of Voorhisville.”

As always, our thanks to Mary for making the time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the episode!

Welcome to episode 15 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast.

For the first time in more than two months, it’s just Jonathan and Gary again, talking about science fiction of the anthropocene, whether science fiction has shifted its “consensus future” away from the optimism of past eras, the notion that forms such as space opera have begun to look more like heroic fantasy than old-fashioned extrapolation, and the rapidly multiplying meanings of the term dystopia.

In an unusual departure from our usual literature-based rambles—we also touch on what we both think of recent MCU contributions like Loki, Black Widow, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier—and what they may tell us about corporate storytelling, along with chatter about Miracle Workers and Jonathan's rewatch of The Lord of the Rings.

As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.

Welcome to episode 14 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary are joined by multiple award-winning author and editor Lavie Tidhar to discuss his brand new anthology, The Best of World SF: Vol 1, his years working to bring SF from around the world to North American and UK audiences, the value of reading widely and from different perspectives, and much more. Along the way we also touch on his forthcoming new novels The Escapement and The Hood, and much more.

As always, our thanks to Lavie for making time to talk to us and we hope you enjoy the episode. See you again soon!

Welcome to episode 13 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary are joined by the wonderful Catherynne M. Valente to talk about her new book The Past is Red, which continues the tale of Tetley Abednego, first introduced to readers in the Sturgeon Award-winning "The Future is Blue" from Jonathan’s anthology Drowned Worlds.

We discuss the origins of that story, of the Hugo-nominated Space Opera and its forthcoming sequel Space Oddity, the thriller Comfort Me With Apples (also forthcoming this October), and the importance of working with supportive editors and agents

As always, our thanks to Cat for taking the time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the episode!

In this episode we are delighted to welcome the extremely talented Emily Tesh, who managed the rare achievement of winning a World Fantasy Award for her first novella Silver in the Wood and a Hugo Award for her first novel, Some Desperate Glory.

We touch upon some works that figure in Emily’s approach to science fiction and fantasy, including Orson Scott Card's Ender’s Game and a children's SF novel from the '90s that she wishes someone would remember the title of (if you know it, let us know in the coments!), her own background in classics and how Some Desperate Glory reflects the military culture of ancient Sparta, the influence of gaming on her work, and what it’s like to be in conversation with the new space opera tradition of Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, Tamsyn Muir, and others. And, a few insights into her forthcoming novel, due out next year.

As always, our thanks to Emily for joining us. We hope you enjoy the episode!

Welcome to episode 12 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary are joined by the remarkable Zen Cho, whose new novel Black Water Sister will be followed later this summer by an expanded version of her Crawford Award-winning collection Spirits Abroad from Small Beer Press.

We touch upon issues of Malaysian identity both in the new books and in her popular duology Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, the stylistic and thematic challenges of writing for diverse audiences and writing humor in fantasy (with early influences including Terry Pratchett and P.G. Wodehouse), and the wonderfully inventive dragons in her short fiction, including the Hugo-winning ‘If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again."

As always, our thanks to Zen for making the time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the episode!

Welcome to episode 11 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary are joined by Daryl Gregory, whose new novella The Album of Dr. Moreau is an improbable but delightful mashup of H.G. Wells, boy bands, Las Vegas, and locked-room murder mysteries.

We discuss the challenges of attempting so much at novella length, the importance of managing tone, and, not least, the sheer fun of the whole undertaking. Along the way, we touch upon some of Daryl’s earlier novels, including The Devil’s Alphabet, Raising Stony Mayhall, We Are All Completely Fine, and Spoonbenders, as well his forthcoming novel Revelator, a gothic tale set in the Smoky Mountains. 

As always, our thanks to Daryl and we hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome to episode 10 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary have a delightful conversation with Nghi Vo, whose The Empress of Salt and Fortune won this year’s Crawford Award and is a Hugo finalist, and whose debut novel The Chosen and the Beautiful, a fantastical revisioning of The Great Gatsby with a queer, Asian Jordan Baker as narrator, is out this week.

We discuss the value of fanfic, the virtues and vacancies of Fitzgerald’s classic novel, the question of whether any narrators are ever reliable, and how Nghi managed to convey the sense of a full epic fantasy in The Empress of Salt and Fortune and then shift to a very different narrative mode in When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, the second novella in the “Singing Hills” cycle.  We also get a preview of the forthcoming novel Siren Queen, with its intriguing exploration—again in fantastic terms—of the early Hollywood film industry as experienced by an Asian actress.

As always, our thanks to our guest, Nghi, for her time. We hope all of you enjoy the episode.

Welcome to episode 9 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary are joined by Nebula and Philip K. Dick award-winning author and musician Sarah Pinsker, whose new novel We Are Satellites is out this week. We touch upon the actual science of brain implants which served as background research for the novel, her reasons for narrating the story from the points of view of four different family members, the issues of corporate responsibility for new technology, and the surprisingly lax government oversight of medical devices such as those featured in the novel. We also discuss the reception of her much-heralded and prescient novel from last year, Song for a New Day, the challenges of writing near-future SF, her own influences and early reading in the field, balancing a career in music with one in fiction, and some of the stories in her collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea.

As always, we'd like to thank Sarah for joining us and hope you enjoy the episode!

Welcome to episode 8 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This time out, Jonathan and Gary are joined by P. Djèlí Clark, whose novella Ring Shout has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards this year and whose first novel, A Master of Djinn, appears this month.

We touch upon themes of colonialism and racism, why he decided to set a steampunk novel in 1912 Cairo, his earlier short fiction, how his work as an academic historian informs his fiction, and what it was like, after a lifetime of reading, to discover a community that seemed to welcome his vision. Djèlí’s insights into everything from old Twilight Zone episodes to Birth of a Nation to Robert Jordan’s fantasies make for one of the more stimulating conversations we’ve had in some time.

As always, our thanks to Djèlí and we hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome to episode 7 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary return to form with a classic ramble through a jumble of topics ranging from the postponement of this year’s Swancon in Perth (and a bit of trivia about an American Swanncon from decades ago); the possible effects of the missing convention years on the SFF field; a brief foray into utopian/dystopian fiction; Charles de Lint, urban fantasy, and his new novel Juniper Wiles; our mutual admiration for Catherynne Valente's forthcoming The Past is Red; and bits about what we’ve been reading lately, including Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful, fictions that focus on a single technology like Sarah Pinsker's We Are Satellites, alternate histories like P. Djèlí Clark's A Master of Djinn, set in Cairo, and why we’ve been overloaded on London steampunk (especially on TV), while other world cities seem to get short shrift in the whole steampunk/alternate history trend. Some of these authors, we promise, will get a chance to speak for themselves in future episodes.

This year has been tough for a lot of people. Swancon has suffered a lot of extra costs and GoH Claire Coleman is running a GoFundMe to help them out. You can donate here. Also, John Varley had major heart surgery earlier this year. They're running a GoFundMe to help him with expenses. You can donate here. Both campaigns are worthy of support.

As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast. We'll see you again soon!

Welcome to episode 6 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary are joined by the delightful Nebula and Aurora winning author Kelly Robson, whose first collection Alias Space and Other Stories has just been published by Subterranean Press. Kelly discusses life during lockdown in Toronto, the joys of becoming a widely admired short fiction writer after starting out as a “late bloomer,” how SF and fantasy helped get through challenging times when younger, what she’s learned from writers such as Michael Bishop, James Tiptree, Jr., Howard Waldrop, and Connie Willis, the worldbuilding behind her novella Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach (and other stories set in that universe), and the fun she’s had exploring humorous fiction in new work that she's completing right now. And, of course, the wonderful stories that go to make up her new collection.

As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast. We'll see you again soon!

Welcome to episode 5 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. After three weeks of unexcused absences, Jonathan and Gary return, just as the world starts re-emerging with the announcement that the Montreal World Fantasy Convention, at least at present, expects to host an in-person event in early November. That led us to return to our occasional discussion of possible candidates for Life Achievement Awards (limited to those over 62 years of age), with Jonathan again presenting his case for Howard Waldrop, which Gary finds it hard to disagree with. But Gary also mentions several other eligible possibilities.

That leads us toward the other categories on the ballot, and we name some possible candidates for novel, novella, anthology, collection, and artist, as well as the more mysterious categories of special achievements, professional and nonprofessional.  As always, we welcome reminders of those we have inevitably overlooked, some of which we will undoubtedly embarrassed about.

As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast. We'll see you again soon!

Welcome to episode 4 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. Despite an unexpected glitch that caused Jonathan to disappear partway through, he and Gary are joined by Veronica Schanoes, whose Burning Girls and Other Stories is just out, with endorsements from writers and scholars as diverse as Karen Joy Fowler, Jack Zipes, Jane Yolen, Catherynne Valente, Jeffrey Ford, and Roz Kaveny. We talk about fairy tales, anti-Semitism, feminism, labour history, immigrant history, punk rock, and many other elements that go to make up her remarkable short stories.

As always, we'd like to thank Veronica for making the time to talk to us, and hope you enjoy the podcast.

Welcome to episode 3 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week the brilliant Aliette de Bodard joins us from Paris to discuss her new Fireheart Tiger, which is already gathering stellar reviews, as well as the challenges of writing a complex romance with significant political themes, how much world-building is needed for a particular story, her use of mystery plots in recent novellas like Seven of Infinities and The Tea Master and the Detective, and the importance of the city of Paris to her well-received Dominion of the Fallen trilogy.

As always, our thanks to Aliette for making time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the episode and see you next time!

With the Glasgow World Science Fiction Convention behind us, and with Gary back in Chicago and Jonathan back in Perth, our faithful podcasters pick up the task once again.

This week we are delighted to welcome long-time friend of the podcast, Nalo Hopkinson, who joins us to discuss her brilliant new novel, Blackheart Man, and her soon to be released short story collection, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions. 

As always, our thanks to Nalo for making the time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the episode. We'll see you in a week or two!

Last year Coode Street sat down with people from all over the world to talk about what they were reading, what they were up to, and how they were coping with strange times. We did it every day, which we probably never will again, and along the way found out it was fun and interesting to check in for a short chat. We're continuing that during 2021.

The second "Ten Minutes with..." chat for 2021 is with Max Gladstone, the acclaimed author of the Craft Sequence, the Empress of Forever and, with Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War.

Max sat down with Jonathan last year and discussed what he had been reading (a lot!), what he'd recommend, and what he had coming up. As always, our thanks to Max for taking the time to chat with us.

Welcome to episode 2 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week, in the second of our main season of twenty-six hour-long episodes, our hosts Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan talk to Locus Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Liza Groen Trombi and award-winning writer Daryl Gregory about the year in science fiction and fantasy.

The annual Locus Recommended Reading issue is due out at the beginning of February featuring an overview of the year, the 50th Locus Reader's Poll and annual recommended reading list, so it seemed like a good time to talk trends, themes, books, and more.  And, of course, there's the odd digression because it's Coode Street and that's what we do.

As always, our thanks to our guests Liza and Daryl. We hope you enjoy the episode and see you next time!

Last year Coode Street sat down with people from all over the world to talk about what they were reading, what they were up to, and how they were coping with strange times. We did it every day, which we probably never will again, and along the way found out it was fun and interesting to check in for a short chat. We're continuing that during 2021.

The first "Ten Minutes with..." chat for 2021 is with Apex Magazine editor and publisher, Jason Sizemore. Apex is an award-winning magazine that publishes fantastic fiction. It paused publication due to illness, but is back with exciting new material in 2021. During our conversation Jason discusses the future of the magazine, watching Deadwood for the first time, and the fiction of Mary Doria Russell.

Welcome to Season 12 of the Coode Street Podcast. This year we're repeating our commitment to bring you at least twenty-six hour-long episodes where our hosts, Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan, talk about science fiction and stuff with little or no coherent purpose, and occasionally interact with interesting people. There will also be additional episodes and bits and pieces, but they'll come in due time.

This week we're delighted to be joined by the venerable John Clute, who talks to us from a weirdly deserted Camden Town in London, discussing the impact of World War I on the surprisingly large numbers of scientific romance writers of the 1920s and 1930s, some provocative ideas which John laid out in his 2017 Telluride talk "Those who do not understand Science Fiction are Condemned to Repeat It", including the notion of “techno-occultism,” what’s happened with space opera, generation starships, and apocalyptic literature, and what’s wrong with the idea of self-driving cars. As usual with John, there are a lot more ideas that pop up along the way.

I suspect, on reflection, some of us are more optimistic about the future of science fiction and the world than this chat suggests, but we hope you enjoy it and want to sincerely thank John for making the time to talk to us.

Since we’re as anxious as everyone else to finally escape 2020, this one is likely to be Jonathan and Gary’s final episode of the year, unless we think of something irresistible.

We start by reminding long-time listeners (or explaining to some for the first time) where the Coode Street name comes from, then honouring major figures we’ve lost in the last couple of weeks, including Ben Bova, Richard Corben, and Phyllis Eisenstein.

Then, as usual at this time of year, we reflect on some of the important and/or overlooked books we’ve read, the continually widening diversity of the field, some of the major works from major writers that appeared in 2020, and the most pleasant surprises of the year.

We wish you the best of holidays and hope to see you in 2021 when everything will be magically all better all at once. (Hey, we’re talking about SF here!)

We're getting to the end of an extraordinary year and it's almost time to shutter the podcast before a well-earned holiday break.

But, before Gary and Jonathan close the door on the Gershwin Room for the last time for 2020, a special gift guide episode. There were no notes, no plans, no lists - just some off-the-cuff gift suggestions for the holidays.  We hope you'll consider your local independent businesses when choosing gifts for the holidays. They're a vital part of our communities.

While this isn't the last time you'll hear from Coode Street in 2020, we would like to thank you all for listening and wish you and your loved ones a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season.

Jonathan and Gary continue their irregular 2020 schedule with a conversation with Charles Coleman Finlay, who for more than five years has carried on the grand tradition of editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Sheree Renée Thomas, who picks up the mantle as new editor beginning with the March/April 2021 issue. We talk about the magazine’s distinguished history, the challenges of maintaining an iconic magazine in a radically changing short fiction field, and their own experiences as SF readers, writers, and editors.

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and book lovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Hugo and Nebula winner Charlie Jane Anders talks about some new books she’s been reading by Rebecca Roanhorse, Holly Black, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Darcy Little Badger, some past favourites including Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Katherine Dunne, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and her own forthcoming YA trilogy—as well as the differences between writing YA and adult fiction.

Books mentioned include:

• Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders
• Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
• The Folk of the Air trilogy by Holly Black
• Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Elatsoe by Darcy Little Badger
• Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

After spending a few minutes chatting about what it’s like to live in a relatively safe but relatively sealed-off environment—something Jonathan can experience in Western Australia, but something SFF has occasionally touched upon—your intrepid hosts venture into the questions raised by Time magazine’s much-discussed list of "The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time,” with occasional reference to similar past lists in Michael Moorcock's Fantasy: The 100 Best Books and Locus magazine's All-Time Best Fantasy poll.

We discuss what’s useful about such lists, what’s silly about them, and who are they really for? Who do they include and who do they exclude, and are they really ever anything much more than something to chat about with friends? As usual, we arrive at some definitively non-definitive answers.

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Today Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning writer Rebecca Roanhorse chats about living and working through lockdown in New Mexico, the appeal of epic fantasy, reading fantasy for pleasure and science non-fiction for work, her stunning new fantasy novel Black Sun, and her experiences working in the writers' room for an unnamed new TV show.

Books mentioned include:

• Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
• Master of Poisons by Andrea Hairston
• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by Adrienne Maree Brown
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark

The Forever War, the debut novel from US writer Joe Haldeman, was first published by St Martins Press in 1974. It was shortlisted for the Locus Award, and was awarded the Hugo and Nebula Awards as Best SF Novel of the year.

It went on to become recognised as an essential classic of the science fiction field, was listed as #1 in the Gollancz Science Fiction Masterworks, and has never been out of print.

On a Saturday afternoon at the recent Glasgow World Science Fiction Convention, Jonathan and Gary and a boisterous crowd of science fiction fans welcomed John Scalzi, Gay Haldeman, and Joe Haldeman to discuss the 50th Anniversary of The Forever War and why it is so beloved.

Our thanks for Joe, Gay, and John for taking part, to the crowd for their support, and to the wonderful tech team from Glasgow 2024: A Worldcon for Our Futures for making the recording possible.

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Hugo Award-winning Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams talk about the early days of the pandemic in Manhattan, the challenges of finding time to read anything other than the 800 submissions per month she sees at the magazine, her good luck to have travelled to Ireland and the Canary Islands just before the lockdown began, her new anthology in the Twelve Tomorrows series from MIT Press, and, of course, what she’s been reading.

Books mentioned include:

• Entanglements: Tomorrow's Lovers, Families, and Friends edited by Sheila Williams
• The Wright Sister by Patty Dann
• Nine Bar Blues by Sheree Renee Thomas
• Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
• A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Multiple award-nominated novelist Paul Park discusses reading the Book of Mormon in preparation for his new novel, the challenges of writing about a society with no recognition of gender (including the problem of pronouns), reading about the Dreyfuss affair, serializing a 14-part story on his Facebook page, and a possible new collection of short fiction.

Books mentioned include:

• A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park
• All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park
• A City Made of Words by Paul Park
• An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
• The Odyssey by Homer  Emily Wilson (trans.)

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Today Jonathan chats with S. Qiouyi Lu about being highly prolific during the pandemic, the pleasures of immersive reading, reading work in translation (especially in Chinese), the growth in diverse voices, how changing times impact on stories, the recently announced novella In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu, and much more.

Books mentioned include:

• In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu (2021)
• Inhalations: Collected Works Vol. 1 by S. Qiouyi Lu 
• The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart