In amongst the hurly burly of the end of the year and putting together the Coode Street Advent Calendar, Gary and Jonathan found time to sit down with long-time friend of the podcast (and most frequent guest!) Kij Johnson.

We last spoke when Kij’s most recent short story collection, The Privilege of the Happy Ending was published. Since then, Kij has been busy working on writing and developing role playing games, most notably the adaption of her fabulous novel The River Bank, which is out now in a gorgeous edition from Kobold Press with stunning art from Kathleen Jennings.

In addition to all that, we talked about books, reading, and for a good while, the nature of farce. As always, our thanks to Kij for making time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the episode as much as we did recording it.

Our guest this week is the remarkable Kemi Ashing-Giwa, whose new novel The King Must Die is out in November. We talk about science fantasy—or whether genre labels mean much at all to the new generation of writers—her own influences, her well-received first novel, the space opera The Splinter in the Sky, and even her current scientific work on mass extinctions and the loss of her family home in the California wildfires earlier this year.

As always, our thanks to Kemi for making time to talk to us today, and we hope you enjoy the episode.

This week we have a lively conversation with the remarkable Ken Liu, whose new thriller All That We See or Seem introduces a new protagonist, the gifted hacker Julia Z, in a tale that explores the growing role of AI, the possibility of a technology of shared dreams, a variety of near-future surveillance tech, and some pretty fearful players with even more fearful schemes. A dramatic shift from his epic fantasy/historical world of the Dandelion Dynasty series or the earlier classic short stories, it seems to represent an exciting new dimension in Ken’s career.

In a rare shorter episode, we chat about the late and much missed Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, with whom Jonathan and Gary had strangely similar encounters some years ago, and her early career as an SF writer before her decades-long success with her Saint-Germain series of vampire novels. That leads, briefly, to considering midlist vs. niche authors, before we get into some of the odd features of American copyright law as revealed by the recent Anthropic AI settlement.

With Gary recently returned from Worldcon in Seattle, we chat a bit about the Hugos (mostly avoiding second-guessing the results), which leads to some discussion of the differences between Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.

Jonathan raises an intriguing question about the novella category, with its rather reductive word-length definition of the form. But what, other than length, really distinguishes a novella from a short story or a novel?

We talk a bit about favorite novellas, and specifically a 2013 Locus survey in which readers voted on the best novellas from 2000-2010. Which of those would still make the list today, and how has Tordotcom’s program of standalone novellas affected our view of the form?

Of course, we ramble a bit about other matters and some interesting new and forthcoming books we’re excited about. Then, finally, we shut up.