As usual, Jonathan and Gary raise a number of thorny questions about reading SF and fantasy, and resolve none of them.

Beginning with Jonathan’s account of his recent reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, we speculate on what sort of expectations we bring as readers to novels in which the interiority of the characters is privileged over the SF elements, whether a novel can do both, and whether the reading protocols are different for different genres.

This leads toward a customarily rambling discussion that touches upon everything from Jo Walton and Ada Palmer’s new nonfiction book Trace Elements to novels by Le Guin, Wolfe, Bujold and others, and eventually leads us to a consideration of Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl novels, along with books we’re either reading right now or looking forward to in the next few weeks.

Today Jonathan and Gary are joined by Nebula, World Fantasy,  and five-time Hugo Award winner Michael Swanwick to discuss the origins of some of his stories, the life and craft of the professional writer, and his extraordinary new short story collection, The Universe Box.

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

As always, the Coode Street Motel Six bestrides continents, so after briefly comparing notes on the weather in Perth and Chicago, Gary and Jonathan get down to it and chat about the subjects of the moment.

How do you talk about books and what was the weather like?
The importance of settings in fiction, especially regarding climate and weather, and the broader question of whether readers can ever fully appreciate a setting dissimilar to their own and how book reviewers might take this into account. This includes a brief discussion of translated fiction—a welcome new category in this year’s Locus Awards.

Anthologies and activism
The significance of advocacy anthologies that may reflect anything from feminist SF (as in Vonda McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson’s Aurora: Beyond Equality (1976) to antiwar works to promoting the New Wave.

Books we’re looking forward to
In a new segment,  we list a few books that we are looking forward to that will be published in the coming weeks.

Jonathan talks about A.G. Slatter’s A Forest, Darkly, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Pretenders to the Throne of God, Paul McAuley’s Loss Protocol, and A.D Sui’s debut The Iron Garden Sutra.

Gary’s list includes  Rebecca Roanhorse’s River of Bones and Other Stories and The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky, a novella by Ian McDonald, Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur, and nonfiction study of SFF by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy. 

There are snowstorms blowing where Gary is and Jonathan can see rain falling outside in Perth’s midsummer, but the Motel Six has been safely relocated and the Gershwin Room is open once again.

Conversation starts off, perhaps incoherently, with dystopias and dystopian fiction, segues to Travis Baldree and the somewhat misdescribed notion of cozy fiction, and then wanders here and there before Jonathan has to head off for a family event. Nothing was resolved, but almost no conversational gambits were harmed during recording.

As always, we hope you enjoy the ramble, and will be back with more before you know it!