The Coode Street Podcast

Welcome to the first of Coode Street’s seasonal hiatus episodes. This November Gary and Jonathan were in Saratoga Springs for the World Fantasy Convention. Over the weekend they recorded several conversations that will come out over the coming weeks. In this first podcast, they sit down with living legend Gene Wolfe to discuss his latest novel, A Borrowed Man. The publisher describes the book like this: A Borrowed Man: a new science fiction novel, from Gene Wolfe, the celebrated author of the Book of the New Sun series. It is perhaps a hundred years in the future, our civilization is gone, and another is in place in North America, but it retains many familiar things and structures. Although the population is now small, there is advanced technology, there are robots, and there are clones. E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person. He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human