The Coode Street Podcast

Over the weekend of June 25-28 Gary travelled to distant and beautiful Mariehamn in the land of the midnight sun where he was to appear as a guest of honor at Archipelacon: The Nordic SF Fantasy Convention. In amongst time spent appearing on panels, making speeches and marveling that the sun was still up as midnight approached, Gary took time to sit down with fellow Archipelacon guest Karin Tidbeck and long-time friend of the podcast Cheryl Morgan to discuss Karin’s writing, Finnish and Swedish SF, some recommended new translations, and much more. As always, our sincere thanks to Karin and Cheryl for taking the time to be part of Coode Street. We hope you enjoy the episode. Next week: Readercon goodness!

This week, with Gary returned from Archipelacon in Finland, we touch once again upon the problems of translation, the Finnish Weird, the international SF community, and such timely matters as the 50th anniversary of Frank Herbert’s Dune, the announcement of World Fantasy Life Achievement winners Ramsey Campbell and Sheri S. Tepper, new critical books in the series from University of Illinois, and even some odd ideas about short books or essays we’d like to see on the model of the 33 1/3 series, as well as the usual random rambles.Next time we'll be back with a special episode recorded at Archipelacon featuring Karin Tidbeck and Cheryl Morgan.  As always, we hope you enjoy this week's show!

This week we are joined by Hugo and Nebula Award winning writer Kim Stanley Robinson to discuss generation starships, how we might live in space, how space opera is becoming a subset of fantasy and his exciting new novel Aurora (due July 7).We are delighted to be able to present what is one of the first major discussions about this extraordinary new novel, which we think will prove to be one of the standout SF novels of 2015. As always, we'd like to thank Stan for making the time to talk to us, and hope you enjoy the podcast.

After a brief, unplanned hiatus due to scheduling and personal issues (meaning that Gary got more involved in the Nebula weekend than he intended to), we return with a discussion that ranges from the Nebula nominees and winners this year, the encouraging sense of the health of the field during the Nebula weekend, the question of whether middle volumes in trilogies are always worth reading, the question of world-building by accretion through a series of stories (as in Fritz Leiber or Robert E. Howard) versus worldbuilding as a pre-writing activity, the question of how to achieves a balance between science fiction and fantasy in anthologies (or if it makes a difference at all), and various other topics that will delight listeners who enjoy our usual rambling, and hopefully not too seriously frustrate others.As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast. Next week: Kim Stanley Robinson on Aurora.

Every year there are thousands of books published and any one of them could appeal to you. To help you find great new books, Locus publishes a list of forthcoming titles every three months.   And to help you navigate through that, each quarter we invite Locus  Editor-in-Chief Liza Groen Trombi to join us and discuss the books that we think might be most interesting that are due out between now and the end of 2015.This month, unfortunately, Liza was not able to join us. However, we have persevered and have some recommendations for you. Of course, we strongly recommend you pick up a copy of the June issue of Locus and see the full list, which goes through to March 2016. As promised, here's our list:ABERCROMBIE, JOE Half a War, Ballantine Del Rey, Jul 2015 (eb, hc) BEAR, GREG Killing Titan, Orbit US, Oct 2015 (hc)BENFORD, GREGORY The Best of Gregory Benford, Sub- terranean Press, Jul 2015 (c, eb, hc)BIANCOTTI, DEBORAH Waking in Winter, PS Publishing, Jul 2015 (na, hc)BLAYLOCK, JAMES P. Beneath London, Titan US, May 2015 (eb, tp)BRAY, LIBBA Lair of Dreams, Little, Brown, Aug 2015 (1st US, ya, eb, hc)CHO, ZEN Sorcerer to the Crown, Macmillan, Sep 2015 (eb, hc)CIXIN, LIU The Dark Forest, Tor, Jul 2015 (eb, hc) DE BODARD, ALIETTE House of Shattered Wings, Penguin/Roc, Sep 2015 (1st US, hc)DICKINSON, SETH The Traitor Boru Cormorant, Macmillan/Tor UK, Aug 2015 (eb, hc)GORODISCHER, ANGELICA Prodigies, Small Beer Press, Aug 2015 (eb, tp) HAND, ELIZABETH Wylding Hall, Open Road, Jul 2015 HOLLAND, CECELIA Dragon Heart, Tor, Sep 2015 (eb, hc) HOPKINSON, NALO Falling in Love with Hominids, Tachyon Publications, Aug 2015 (c, tp)HURLEY, KAMERON Empire Ascendant, Angry Robot US, Oct 2015 (eb, tp)HUTCHISON, DAVE, Europe in Autumn, Solaris, UK/US Nov 2015  (tp)KIERNAN, CAITLÍN R. Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, Subterranean Press, Nov 2015 (c, eb, hc)KRESS, NANCY The Best of Nancy Kress, Subterranean Press, Sep 2015 (c, eb, hc)LECKIE, ANN Ancillary Mercy, Orbit US, Oct 2015 (tp) LIU, KEN The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Simon Schuster/Saga Press, Nov 2015 (c, eb, hc)McDONALD, IAN Luna: New Moon, Tor, Sep 2015 (eb, hc)McDONALD, IAN The Best of Ian MacDonald, PS Publishing, Jun 2015 (c, hc) McDONALD, IAN The Locomotives’ Graveyard, PS Publishing, Aug 2015 (na, hc) McDONALD, IAN Mars Stories, PS Publishing, Aug 2015 (c, hc)MIÉVILLE, CHINA Three Moments of an Explosion, Ballantine Del Rey, Aug 2015 (1st US, c, eb, hc) MITCHELL, DAVID Slade House, Random House, Oct 2015 (eb, hc) MORROW, JAMES Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow, Wesleyan University Press, Nov 2015 (c, hc)NAGATA, LINDA, The Red:Going Dark, Saga Press, Nov 2015 (hc)NIX, GARTH  To Hold the Bridge, Harper, Jun 2015 (c, ya, hc)PRATCHETT, TERRY The Shepherd’s Crown, HarperCollins, Sep 2015 (ya, hc) REYNOLDS, ALASTAIR The Best of Alastair Reynolds, Subterranean Press, Nov 2015 (c, eb, hc)RICKERT, MARY The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece: New and Selected Stories, Small Beer Press, Aug 2015 (c, eb, tp)ROBERTS, ADAM The Thing Itself, Orion/Gollancz, Dec 2015 (tp)SCALZI, JOHN The End of All Things, Tor, Aug 2015 (eb, hc)SWANWICK, MICHAEL Chasing the Phoenix, Tor, Aug 2015 (eb, hc) WESTERFELD, SCOTT Zeroes (with Margo Lanagan Debo rah Biancotti), Simon Pulse, Sep 2015 (ya, hc)WOLFE, GENE A Borrowed Man, Tor, Oct 2015 (eb, hc)As always, we hope you enjoy the episode! Correction: During the podcast Jonathan incorrectly said Linda Nagata's Going Dark was the reissue of the first book in her "The Red" sequence. It's actually the third, with The Red: First Light coming in June, The Red: The Trials in August, and series closer The Red: Going Dark in November. All are worth your attention.

This week we pay a return visit to World Fantasy Award winning author Elizabeth Hand, discussing her new short novel Wylding Hall, the British folk revival of the 1970s which provides the novel’s background, the use of multiple narrators (and the advantages of audio-books in differentiating them), and such diverse matters as the legacy of Arthur Machen, why there aren’t more fantasy novels about the arts, and what to expect next in her ongoing series of crime novels involving the troubled ex-punk photographer Cass Neary.As always, our thanks to Liz for making the time to talk to us and we hope you enjoy the podcast!

This week we sit down and discuss the World Fantasy Awards, the Life Achievement Award, and quite a lot more. Another old-fashioned ramble for the Coode Street Archives.We would mention that members of the 2013, 2014 and 2015 World Fantasy Conventions are eligible to vote for this year's World Fantasy Awards. A voting form is available, and you may vote via email.  Voting closes 31 May 2015. Support what you think is worthy.As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast and will be back next week with more.

This week we are joined by the Hugo and Nebula Award winning Paolo Bacigalupi, who is just about to publish his first science fiction novel for adults since 2009s The Windup Girl.Picking up from where his harrowing short story "The Tamarisk Hunter" left off, The Water Knifeis lean thriller that asks important questions about how global warming will affect us all as seas rise in some places and drinking water becomes scarce in others.The publisher of the book describes The Water Knifelike this:In the American Southwest, Nevada, Arizona, and California skirmish for dwindling shares of the Colorado River. Into the fray steps Angel Velasquez, detective, leg-breaker, assassin and spy. A Las Vegas water knife, Angel “cuts” water for his boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her lush, luxurious arcology developments can bloom in the desert, so the rich can stay wet, while the poor get nothing but dust.When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in drought-ravaged Phoenix, Angel is sent to investigate. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with no love for Vegas and every reason to hate Angel, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas refugee who survives by her wits and street smarts in a city that despises everything that she represents. With bodies piling up, bullets flying, and Phoenix teetering on collapse, it seems like California is making a power play to monopolize the life-giving flow of a river. For Angel, Lucy, and Maria time is running out and their only hope for survival rests in each other’s hands. But when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only thing for certain is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink.The conversation is, as always, fascinating and provocative. We're very grateful to Paolo for making the time to return to the podcast and, as always, hope you enjoy the episode.

This week we return, without guests, to a topic with which we have annoyed listeners in podcasts for years—the idea of SF canon formation: who gets dropped from the canon, who gets added, and whether such things as Hugo nominations make any difference at all. The decade between 1985 and 1995 (20-30 years ago now), saw the deaths of many of the writers who helped establish much of the "classic" SF canon — Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, John Brunner, Roger Zelazny, James Tiptree Jr, Cliffard Simak, Lester del Rey, Philip K. Dick, C.L. Moore, and more. Who among them are still being discovered by new readers, and which writers and books in the last 20 years are likely candidates for a future canon? Does it take 50 years or more to determine what is canonical? Are Hugos any sort of reliable guide? And what difference do canons make anyway, beyond collective lists of personal favorites? We also have decided, as announced in the podcast, to officially support the Helsinki in 2017 and Dublin in 2019 WorldCon bids. Coode St endorses these conventions, will be buying memberships to them, and will attend should they be successful. Both Gary and Jonathan are eager to be part of major international WorldCon events like 2014's Loncon. We hope you'll join us in supporting these great bids.We hope you enjoy this week's episode. Next week: Paolo Bacigalupi and The Water Knife!

This week James Bradley and Ian Mond join Jonathan to discuss the five novels that have made the final Hugo Awards ballot. The shortlisted novels are: Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK) The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson (Tor Books) The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) (Tor Books) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu (Tor) Skin Game by Jim Butcher (Roc Books)We almost completely avoid issues surrounding the ballot, and instead focus on discussing the novels and what might make them interesting to read.  Our thanks to James and Ian for making time to record the podcast. As always, we hope you enjoy the episode!

This week’s very special episode is a conversation with the superb and formerly mysterious K.J. Parker, whose newest work The Two of Swords begins serialization this week from Orbit, and whose Savages is due later this summer from Subterranean Press.  We discuss the influence of writers as diverse as E.F. Benson, P.G. Wodehouse, Mercedes Lackey, and C.J. Cherryh, the reason there isn’t much overt magic in Parker’s worlds, the freedom offered by fantasy over straight historical fiction, the relative advantages of novellas vs. novels, where all that wonderful dialogue comes from, and—of course—who K.J. Parker really is...As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

Welcome to The Coode Street Podcast, an informal weekly discussion about science fiction and fantasy featuring award-winning critics and editors Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe.  The Coode Street Podcast debuted in 2010 and has been nominated for the Hugo, British Science Fiction, and Aurealis awards. This week Jonathan and Gary talk to old friend  Eileen Gunn, along with  Chris Brown,  and very special guest  William Gibson , in a discussion that ranges from William’s recent novel The Peripheral to the influences of writers as diverse as Mervyn Peake, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, and Avram Davidson and the question of what it means to write in and out of genre. We hope you find it as interesting as we all did recording it.  Coode Street, Episode 220 (1hr 17mins) The Coode Street Podcast is published by The Coode Street Press and Gary K. Wolfe, and is syndicated by Tor.com.

Jonathan returns and our heroes spend some time discussing the history and nature of short story collections in science fiction and fantasy. Warning: Contains some facts and a lot of wild speculation.Next week: William Gibson!

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!