The Coode Street Podcast

This week we welcome James Morrow, one of SF’s premier satirists, whose new novel Galapagos Regained is just out, taking on Darwinism, Victorian religious attitudes, the Book of Mormon, and Morrow’s frequent themes of rationalism vs. received belief.  We also touch upon the role of a religious satirist, the Charlie Hebdo assassinations, old SF movies and TV programs, Morrow’s recent novellas Shambling Towards Hiroshima and The Madonna and the Starship, and his forthcoming collection Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow from Wesleyan University Press.

More than two years ago, at the 2012 World Fantasy Convention in Toronto, Ontario, Gary and Jonathan sat down with Guy Gavriel Kay to discuss his then new novel River of Stars.  A now legendary discussion followed, that quickly became mythical when technical issues resulted in that recording and several others being permanently lost. In an attempt to redress the loss of that earlier conversation, Guy agreed to join Jonathan and Gary for the discussion that follows while they were all in Washington DC for the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.   As always, we would like to thank Guy for his patience and for being part of the podcast. It is greatly appreciated. We hope you all enjoy the episode and will be back next week!

Suddenly our intrepid heroes, still mostly living on vacation time,realised that they needed to put out another episode of the podcast. Plans for a leisurely hiatus were abandoned and, somewhat the worse for New Year wear, they sat down in front of their microphones, and began to ramble.  This week's discussion starts with a look at some end of the year comments made by Locus Online short fiction reviewer Lois Tilton, which had Jonathan nodding his head in some agreement, and wandered on to his vague thoughts on genre cohesiveness (or something) and ended with thought from Gary on who will we remember this year from the Class of 1915 (or something). All in all, a typical Coode Street. Next week, finally as promised, Guy Gavriel Kay! As always we hope you enjoy the episode, and will see you next week!

The third of our short series of podcasts recorded at the World Fantasy Convention in Washington DC, this one features a particularly laughter-filled conversation with award-winning writers and editors, and long-time friends and collaborators, Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. While it's been long enough since the podcast was recorded that we're not sure any of it made sense, we do know it was a lot of fun to record. We hope it's a lot of fun to listen to. As always, our sincere thanks to Jack and Gardner for making the time to talk to us, and our thanks to you for listening.  We hope you're all either enjoying a well-earned holiday over the Festive Season, or finding a way to enjoy yourself if you have to work through it, and that we see you safe and well when we're back recording live in a couple weeks.  Next week: Guy Gavriel Kay.

This week the first of our series of World Fantasy Convention 2014 podcasts.  Award-winning writers Helen Marshall and Robert Shearman sit down with Gary and Jonathan to discuss writing, their careers, their new books and much more. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

For the final episode before our Christmas hiatus, Jonathan and Gary are joined by award-winning writer and critic James Bradley to discuss the best books of 2014. Any lists are going to be incomplete, but we make an attempt to talk about a lot of what we thought was worthwhile from the year just coming to a close. We also briefly mention our big new announcement about Coode St becoming a Tor.com podcast, something we are very happy about. We would like to thank James for joining us on this episode, and all of our guests throughout the year who made time to talk to us.  We'd also like to thank all of you, our listeners, for spending some time with us in 2014.  It's been a great year, and one we're proud of being able to bring to you. We hope you, your families, and all of your loved ones have safe and happy holidays and that we'll see you back here in January! Note: We will be issuing new podcasts recorded at World Fantasy Convention during our hiatus, so do tune in here next week for another new Coode St.

The Coode Street Podcast is fortunate to have a small group of guests who have appeared on the show more than once. This week we welcome back our most regular visitor, the wonderful Kij Johnson, who brings us up to date on the weather in Kansas, what she's been writing, and on re-imagining our genre's past.  It was enormous fun talking to Kij and we'd like to thank her for making time on a chilly Saturday evening to talk to us on Coode Street. We apologise for some minor technical issues. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast, and will be back next week with more! Note: This is a reissue of the original episode, which had some issues.

This week Gary and Jonathan are joined by the wonderful Genevieve Valentine who talks intelligently, coherently and very interestingly about television, film, her latest novel The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, writing for comics and her extended run with Catwoman, and a lot, lot more.  Genevieve's brilliance is a little overshadowed by bumbling hosts, who were exceptionally bumbling this weekend, and by perfidious technology (for which our apologies to both you and to Genevieve). Nonetheless, we think there's a lot worth listening to and hope you will persevere.  Our sincere thanks to Genevieve for making the time to record the podcast, and to all of you for listening. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.

We went to Washington DC to celebrate the 40th World Fantasy Convention and came back to the first books and stories of 2014. As long-time listeners know, this is the time when the season turns, when work beings on summing up the year we've had, and when the old year ends and the new one begins. This episode, with brief and incoherent gift guide, is the beginning of the end of 2014. As always, we hope you will forgive the rambling and enjoy the episode. See you next week!

This past weekend the World Fantasy Convention was held in Arlington, Virginia.  As part of the festivities, the Coode Street Podcast team produced the second ever "live" Coode Street Podcast. This time the wonderful Caitlin R. Kiernan and Peter Straub joined Jonathan and Gary to discuss: The Literary Uses of FantasyPanelists: Jonathan Strahan, Gary K. Wolfe, Peter Straub, Caitlin R. Kiernan Description: The Coode Street Podcast discusses the literary uses of fantasy with Peter Straub and other special guests.  Why do writers clearly capable of realistic, character-driven stories choose to introduce fantastic elements, some of them extreme, into their stories?  What does the fantasy enable them to do that the more realistic narrative doesn’t? The podcast went very well, and we're happy that it's now ready for you. We would like to sincerely thank Caitlin and Peter for making the time available to be part of the podcast again, and the team at WFC2014 for helping us organise and record the episode. It was deepl

This week Hugo Award winning author of the God's War Trilogy Kameron Hurley joins Gary and Jonathan to discuss her new novel The Mirror Empire, winning the Hugo Award, social media, and writing SF/F in the 21st Century. As always, we would like to thank Kameron for joining us on the podcast, and hope you enjoy the episode. Next week: World Fantasy!

In recent weeks Coode Street has discussed the national SF scenes in the United Kimgdom, Australia and China. This week we are joined by Peter Halasz and Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Robert J Sawyer, both long-standing advocates of Canadian science fiction, to discuss what's happening in SF/F north of the US border.  We'd like to thank both Bob and Peter for joining us in what was a very spirited and energetic discussion. Next week: Kameron Hurley!  Till then, we hope you enjoy the episode.

Following on from our recent conversations about British and Australian Science Fiction, this week we invited Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award winning author and translator Ken Liu to join us to discuss translating fiction, his experiences with Chinese SF and his forthcoming translation of Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem (which Gary officially has recommended as a Coode Street Recommended Book). We'd like to thank Ken for joining us in what proved to be an extremely interesting conversation. Next week: Canada! Till then, we hope you enjoy the episode.

This week Gary and Jonathan, aware that the Festive Season and more are in front of us all, sit down with the most recent 'Forthcoming Books' issue of Locus and do their best to assemble a quick, on-the-fly list of books we're looking forward to from October through to May next year. As Gary and Jonathan both say on the podcast, the list has been quickly assembled and certainly misses many worthwhile books. Still, it's a start.  Here's the list. These are books we'll be reading, discussing and possibly recommending in coming months.   October 2014Bacigalupi, Paolo, The Doubt Factory, (Little, Brown, nvl-ya, hc) Bear, Greg, War Dogs, (Orbit US, hc) Carroll, Jonathan, Bathing the Lion, (St. Martin's, hc) Gibson, William, The Peripheral, (Penguin/Putnam, hc) Leckie, Ann, Ancillary Sword, (Orbit US, tp) Newman, Kim, The English Ghost Story, (Titan, tp) Nix, Garth, Clariel, (Hot Key Books, nvl-ya, hc) November 2014Baxter, Stephen, Ultima, (Orion/Gollancz, hc) Herbert, Frank, Frank Herbert: Collected Stories, (To

Sure that we were on to something, we decided to follow up last week's discussion of the State of British SF with Paul Kincaid and Nina Allan with a discussion about the State of Australian SF with editor/publisher Alisa Krasnostein of Twelfth Planet Press and bestselling Australian SF writer Sean Williams.   While there is always more that could be said about trends, particular publishers, or individual writers, a fairly-wide-reaching conversation did manage to cover a lot in a little over an hour.  The podcast also includes some recommendations for books we think you should check out if you're interested in current Australian SF. As always, we would like to thank our guests Alisa and Sean for making the time to be on the podcast, and hope that you enjoy the episode. See you next week!

This week something special. Following on from conversations at the London Worldcon and articles by Martin Petto * and others, Gary and Jonathan are joined by Nina Allan and Paul Kincaid to discuss the state of British science fiction. Are we having breakfast in the ruins, or is there hope to be found on the bookshelves? Mentioned during the podcast, Gwyneth Jones's first new novel in six years, The Grasshopper's Child (now available from electronic retailers). Pick up a copy (it's cheap!) and discover or rediscover this marvelous writer. As always, our thanks to our guests. We hope you enjoy the podcast. *Correction: Martin Petto's name was spelled incorrectly in this post. Apologies for the error.

Time to get back to the conversation and put the wonderful LonCon experience behind us. With episode 201, Jonathan and Gary sit down to continue their ongoing discussion of science fiction, fantasy and other stuff. As always, we hope you enjoy the episode.

The first episode of the three time Hugo Award nominated Coode Street Podcast went out to the world on Saturday 8 May 2010. There was no intention to start a regular podcast, or an ongoing conversation with and about science fiction, but that’s what happened.  In the four years since we recorded that first episode little has changed except, we hope, a tendency to ramble a little less. The recording is still rough and ready (alas), and the conversation is still off the cuff and unprepared (happily).   To celebrate the extremely unlikely event that we were recording our 200th episode, we decided to do something special. We invited our good friends Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Silverberg and Jo Walton to join us in conversation at Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention.  A lively and interesting conversation was had, in what we think is one of our best ever episodes. Our sincere thanks to Stan, Bob and Jo for making their time available and being a part of our celebrations.  Our special thanks to

And we're back!  After traveling for far too long and having had a wonderful time in London at what may have been the biggest and best WorldCon ever, our intrepid commentators are back on Coode St pondering (at length, alas!) what made Loncon a success, the Hugo Awards results, and the future and purpose of SF (of course!).  As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast. Next week: Episode 200!!!!

With Loncon3, the largest WorldCon in history disappearing into the rear-view mirror, convention guest of honour John Clute joins Gary and Jonathan on the podcast to discuss fantastika, the mission of science fiction, the SF Encyclopedia and much more. In the run-up to episode 200, recorded live in London, we'll probably have a wrap-up episode shortly. Till then, our thanks to John for joining us and, as always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!