The Coode Street Podcast kicked off in May 2010. Over the next 568 episodes Jonathan and Gary, and far too many friends of the podcast to be named here individually, talked about a shared love of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in all of their many forms.

Just a week ago, the members of the World Science Fiction Convention awarded the Coode Street Podcast with the Hugo Award for Best Fancast. This time out we take a moment, on the very edge of the holidays, to say thank you. Thank you to everyone out there involved, no matter how small or how large your contribution to our ongoing conversation. We will ever be in deeply in your debt for your support.

We’ll be back in 2022, but for now we’d like to wish you a safe, happy, and healthy holiday season and a thoroughly magical New Year. See you again soon!

The holiday season is upon us, another strange, unforgettable year is almost done, and here at Coode Street it’s time for our annual gift guide/year in review, where we recommend some books we loved during the year.

This time out we invited special guests and good friends James Bradley, Alix E. Harrow, and Ian Mond to join us to recommend just a few of the books we’d loved the most during 2021. Perhaps more than in any other year, this was a time when we all were almost surprised at how much great reading we found.

Because this is Coode Street, traditions are traditions and we had some technical issues. All is good for most of the hour of the recording, but there’s a jump or two towards the end. We hope you’ll excuse this, and that the recommendations will prove of interest.

As always, our thanks to Alix, James, and Ian for making time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the podcast and that the guide is of some use. To help, the recommendations are below. And we’re in talks to maybe return in January for a books we’re looking forward to chat as well…

James Bradley recommended:

Jennifer Mills, The Airways
Elizabeth Knox, The Absolute Book
Nina Allan, The Good Neighbours
Olga Ravn, The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century

and also mentioned:

Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun
Laura Jean McKay, The Animals in That Country
Marion Engel, Bear
Garth Nix, Terciel and Elinor
Sim Kern, Depart, Depart
Hari Kunzru, Red Pill

Alix E. Harrow recommended:

Lee Mandelo, Summer Sons
Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun
Ava Reid, The Wolf and the Woodsman
Nghi Vo, The Chosen and the Beautiful

And I also loved/mentioned/endorsed:

Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Angela Slatter, All the Murmuring Bones

Ian Mond recommended:

Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith
The Thing Between Us, Gus Moreno
The Confessions of Copeland Cane, Keenan Norris
All the Murmuring Bones, Angela Slatter
Dead Souls, Sam Rivière
The Angels of L19, Jonathan Walker
Mrs Death: Misses Death, Salena Godden
The Employees, Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken)

Jonathan recommended:

The Hood, Lavie Tidhar
A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers
The Wisdom of Crowds, Joe Abercrombie

and passingly mentioned The Detective Up Late by Adrian McKinty.

Gary recommended:

Karin Tidbeck, The Memory Theatre
M. Rickert, The Shipbuilder of Belfairie
E. Lily Yu, On Fragile Waves
Nina Allan, The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories
P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn

Pus a couple of titles that were also on other folks’ lists, like The Hood and The Chosen and the Beautiful.

Welcome to episode 25 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week Jonathan and Gary sit down with the very talented and extremely busy Sheree Renée Thomas to discuss her award-winning collection Nine Bar Blues, her first year editing the venerable Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the lasting impact of her Dark Matter anthologies, her forthcoming anthologies Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue (co-edited with Pan Morrigan and Troy L. Wiggins) and Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction (co-edited with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight, her own experiences growing up as an SF and horror reader, and the new age of recognizing African and African diaspora SFF.  It’s a pretty lively conversation.

As always, our sincere thanks to Sheree Renée Thomas, and we hope you enjoy the episode.

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Welcome to episode 24 of Season 12 of the Coode Street Podcast. As the year draws to a close and winter comes to Chicago and summer to Perth, Gary and Jonathan sit down for an unexpected and unplanned conversation about life achievement awards and their meaningfulness, a brief foreshadowing of a discussion about interrogating the sociopolitical assumptions of a work of fiction, and more.

This time out there were a few technical issues in the final five minutes of the recording, but those have hopefully been addressed by editing. Two episodes remain in the season – a good time to be discussing the year in review and the best fiction of 2021 – before we go on hiatus, but for now we hope you enjoy the episode!

Welcome to episode 23 of Season 12 of The Coode Street Podcast. This week, after a brief and mostly irrelevant discussion of whether the proposition that Ray Bradbury as the quintessential October writer means anything at all outside North America, Jonathan and Gary actually try to focus on an important question: whether posthumous publications actually do anything to enhance an author’s reputation.

We make distinctions between works that the author clearly wanted to be published (like Philip K. Dick final four novels), works that the author clearly did not intend for publication (like some late Heinlein manuscripts), and works which the author may or may not have tried to publish during their lifetimes (such as a number of R.A. Lafferty manuscripts completed or continued by other hands, including novels by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Robert Jordan, and Terry Pratchett). We even touch upon whether the J. Michael Straczynski The Last Dangerous Visions is a useful idea decades after Harlan Ellison began the project. Do author’s estates see posthumous publication as a means of keeping an author’s name alive, as a purely commercial proposition, or as a way of arguing for an author’s canonical status? Other authors touched upon include J.R.R. Tolkien, John M. Ford, Philip José Farmer, and even a few examples from mainstream fiction, such as John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which won a Pulitzer Prize more than a decade after its author’s death.

As always, we hope you enjoy the episode.