The Coode Street Podcast

Once again, with almost no preparation, we head up to the Gershwin Room and end up discussing reviewing, digital texts, and other related issues. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.

This week the Coode Street team headed back to the Waldorf Room high in the Coode Street Motel Six to discuss the annual Locus Year in Review issue, the publishing industry, and other matters.  We also briefly discuss two forthcoming novels, Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars and Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood. The Locus Recommended Reading List is online, as is the annual Locus Poll and a list of links to recommended short fiction.  As discussed during the episode, both Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan work for Locus and were actively involved in compiling the recommended reading list.  You can subscribe to Locus here. The Year in Review issue is available as the start of a subscription or as a stand-alone issue. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

Back to the Waldorf Room where, in troubled times, the Coode Street podcast team meet to discuss publishing artifacts as framing devices, Bruce Sterling's new book, awards eligibility and possibly other stuff.  We even shamelessly mention that this podcast is eligible for Hugo Award nomination (you have been warned). As always, we hope you enjoy the digression.

With Gary's commitments fulfilled, we once again headed to the Gershwin Room, where we were joined by award-winning writer Nancy Kress to discuss writing, science fiction, the future, and all sorts of other interesting stuff. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast and will see you next week!

The quiet days after the New Year, when Coode Street scribes spend their days slowly summarising the moments of the  year just gone and contemplating what the year ahead might bring, pass slowly in the chill of Chicago and the sweltering heat of the Antipodes. With little specific to discuss, we nonetheless headed to the Waldorf Room high atop the Coode St Motel Six, with no clear intention of what would unfold. Moments before podcasting began, though, a query came through from James Bradley, asking our thoughts on excellent contemporary fantasy. Interest piqued, we discussed, we listed and we chatted. While we would love to hear listeners recommendations, these are the books we discussed (and recommended) during the podcast: Contemporary Fantasy Novels (in the order mentioned on the podcast) Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock The Drowning Girl, Caitlin R. Kiernan Last Call, Tim Powers Ysabel, Guy Gavriel Kay The Limits of Enchantment, Graham Joyce The Wizard Knight, Gene Wolfe The Golden Compass,

This week we headed up to the Gershwin Room to discuss the recently announced Locus All Time Poll results, writing for the end of the year and other similarly pre-New Year's Eve kinds of things. As always,  we hope you enjoy the podcast!

This week we're joined in the Gershwin Room by newly annointed SFWA Grand Master Gene Wolfe to discuss writing, his work, his new novel, and much more.  We had hoped to feature listener questions, and would like to sincerely thank everyone who sent questions in, but they ended up not quite fitting the format. We are sincerely grateful, however, to everyone who wanted to be involved.  As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

This week we return to the Gershwin Room to chat with Maureen McHugh, award-winning author of novels China Mountain Zang, Half the Day is Night, Mission Child, and Nekropolis, and the short story collections Mothers and Other Monsters and After the Apocalypse. We discuss her time in Los Angeles and how it is affecting her writing, the nature of story, and many other things.  As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast! PS: This podcast is usually cross-posted at www.jonathanstrahan.com.au/wp, however that site is unavailable at the moment. The episode will be published there when service is restored.

After a long delay due to technical issues with our hosting service, Podbean, we are now able to bring you the latest episode of The Coode Street Podcast. Episode 126 was recorded on Sunday, 9 December by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe, who rambled about various subjects to do with science fiction and fantasy. The recording was done so long ago, though, that neither podcaster quite remembers what they discussed or is willing to listen to the podcast to find out what.  If you do listen to the podcast, please consider describing this episode in the comments. "General rambling", commenters are reminded, is a category and not a description.  Although we don't remember the podcast, we still hope you enjoy it. We'll be back next weekend, technology permitting, with a new episode!

In one of our most problem-free podcasts of recent times, Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan return to the Waldorf Room high atop the corporate tower that is the Coode Street Motel Six to discuss lists, the Locus All-Time Poll that has just closed, and essays/articles by Paul McAuley on "Lets Put the Future Behind Us" and Jonathan McAlmont on "Annoyed with the History of Science Fiction", with passing reference to Gary Westfahl and Paul Kincaid (but only passing). Along the way lists were made, recommendations avoided, and a laugh or two was had. It's one of our longest podcasts of recent times, for which apologies, but as always we hope you enjoy it. See you next week!

And now the podcast that technology did not want you to hear! When the Coode Street team traveled to Toronto, Canada for the 2012 World Fantasy Convention we planned and recorded a series of podcasts that have become known as the Great Lost Coode St Podcasts. Five podcasts cruelly wiped by idiosyncratic technology (and definitely not incompetent users) featuring Jo Walton, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Shearman & Ellen Klages, James Blaylock & Tim Powers, and Graham Joyce. This week Graham Joyce incredibly kindly agreed to try again, to join us via Skype and have an entirely new conversation about fiction, fairy tale and much, much more.  And five minutes into recording Skype, for the first time in 124 podcasts, crashed.  Ignoring all of the signals from the universe that this podcast was not meant to happen, we pushed forward and despite a slightly tinny connection and the accidental return of the dreaded stereo, ended up with a conversation that we think totally rewarded our persistence. W

With jetlag slowly disappearing into the haze of memory, we once again ascended to the Waldorf Room high above the Coode St Motel 6 to discuss science fiction, list making, new writers, C.J. Cherryh, recnogition and other stuff. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

And just like that, World Fantasy Convention is a thing of the past. Awards were won, podcasts lost, and good times had by all.  This week, suffering from terrible jetlag, we muddle through a rambling discussion of some of the high points of the week in Toronto. Apologies for the odd stereo on this one. Another technical glitch, but it will be remedied next week. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.

Suffering a little from lack of sleep prior to heading off to Toronto for World Fantasy Convention, Gary and I headed up to the Waldorf Room and recorded a short podcast to keep you going till we get back. As always, we hope you enjoy it!

With the days flying by as we race towards the official appearance of The Coode St Podcast team at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto in two weeks, award-winning author and critic James Bradley joined us in the Waldorf Room to discuss science fiction, literary fiction and all sorts of other stuff. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

This week Gary and I sit down with very little planned and just talk about us.  We spent a little time discussing: Gary's Library of America series Eclipse: Online We hope you'll forgive our poor planning self-indulgence and that you enjoy the podcast!

Not so long ago we were lucky enough to have the wonderful Kij Johnson, author of the new story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees, join us in the Waldorf Room to discuss gender, transgressive fiction and other cool stuff.  That conversation was never completed, so were eager to have her back as our guest. Happily, she joins us to continue that discussion and to consider the importance of not flinching in fiction, and the recent discussion of the state of science fiction by Paul Kincaid, Jonathan McAlmont, and Mike Harrison (among others).  It proved to be a wide-ranging discussion, another total delight, and we hope the precursor to another discussion sometime soon. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

This week we were joined in the Waldorf Room by Campell Award winning author Kathleen Ann Goonan, where we discussed the future of science fiction, teaching SF, nanotechnology, women writing hard science fiction,  her new collection Angels and You Dogs, the Nanotech Quartet, and her most recent novel, This Shared Dream.  As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

During Episode 115 of the Podcast we discussed Paul Kincaid's review essay, "The Widening Gyre" (originally published by the LA Review of Books). In the essay, while reviewing three 'best of the year' anthologies, Paul asked whether science fiction was suffering from exhaustion and, more importantly perhaps, whether writers had lost confidence that the future was comprehensible and therefore storyable. Our original conversation didn't cover the subject well, so we invited Paul to join us in the Gershwin Room to discuss the essay and the issues surrounding it.  Our thanks to Paul for being such a generous guest and, as always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.

We are back after an unexpected break over the WorldCon weekend. We intended to have a podcast for you, and to record many, many exciting interviews. Instead, life took over and we did something else. However, we were back in the Gershwin Room this weekend to discuss the Hugo Awards, Paul Kincaid's LA Times article on the exhaustion of science fiction, and steampunk, through the lens of two very fine stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan ("Goggles (c.1910)" from Steampunk 3) and Nick Mamatas ("Arbeitschraft" from The Mammoth Book of Steampunk). As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!