Can you believe a storyteller? Ray Bradbury was a consummate storyteller who, in the introduction to his 1950 short story collection The Martian Chronicles, offered a possible origin story for the work.

He had, he recalled, been 24 years of age when he read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, a collection of stories about small-town life.  The book inspired him to wonder if he could do something similar for American small-town life, but set on Mars.

In amongst his other commitments, he set sail on a journey that ultimately would see him produce close to three dozen short stories set on the red planet. The first, “The Million Year Picnic” appeared in 1946, but they followed over the next four years. At some point between then and 1948 Bradbury set the notion of a book to one side and it was only when he travelled to New York in 1949 that he picked the task up once more.

Doubleday editor Walter Bradbury was interested in publishing Bradbury, but needed a novel to anchor the deal. It was he who suggested that Bradbury should sketch out a plan for a book, and who then signed it up and published it the following year.  The Martian Chronicles went on to international acclaim, selling millions of copies across many, many editions, and remaining one of Bradbury’s most famous works.

The recent 80th anniversary of the first appearance of “The Million Year Picnic” and the passing this week of August 4, 2026 (the date specified in “There Will Come Soft Rains”) inspired Gary and Jonathan to sit down with Jeffrey Ford and Kelly Link to discuss the continuing relevance of Bradbury’s classic work.

In this week’s episode, we sort of turn the tables on Jonathan to discuss the art of assembling anthologies, and in particular no fewer than four books he has coming out over the next few months: Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Book of the Dead, Vaster Than Empires:, Speculative Fiction of the Eternal and the Ephemeral , and The Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1.

Not surprisingly, there is a story behind each of these. One honors one of our greatest writers, another continues a popular series that began with The Book of Dragons and The Book of Witches, a third comes from MIT Press, and the fourth includes stories voted on by jurors at Locus magazine. Along the way we both get to mention some of our favorite writers, along with new discoveries and other surprises—in other words, why anthologies are almost always fun to read.

Order links:

• Revolution in the Heart, Titan Books, September
• The Book of  the Dead, Harper Voyager, October 2026
• Vaster than Empires, MIT Press, November 2026
• The Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1, Locus Press, November 2026

This week, Jonathan and Gary are joined by multiple award winning writer and critic Amal El-Mohtar, whose first story collection Seasons of Glass and Iron appeared earlier this year, and whose novella The River has Roots has won Nebula and Locus awards for 2026.

We talk about our favorite stories in the collection, a diverse range of writers including Patricia McKillip, J.R.R. Tolkien, Hope Mirrlees, Virginia Woolf, and Charle de Lint, and about Amal’s own experiences as a writer of Lebanese descent living in Canada and Glasgow.

We hope that what the discussion lacks in focus, it makes up with Amal’s sharp insights as a writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism (in her occasional New York Times Book Review columns).

Many podcasts far more professional than ours have offered discrete segments covering different topics, so this week we decided to carefully organize the episode—wait, no we didn’t; we’re just rambling again. But we do begin with a small tribute to Jane Yolen, both a great writer and a great friend, which leads into some musings on how reputations are made and sustained. We then touch upon the recent Nebula Awards, the role of small presses like Subterranean, and some exciting new books we’re reading, including Jacly Moriarty’s Time Travel for Beginners. By our standards, all this is carefully planned and laser-focused.