And we’re back! It’s Columbus, it’s World Fantasy and Gary and I recorded a short podcast today, face to face for the first time. More to come!

The countdown to Columbus and World Fantasy is one. Less than two weeks till I get there, and with deadlines bearing down Gary and I fired up Skype and discussed the World Fantasy Awards, mortality, the AUS/USD exchange rate, The Hobbit getting the green light, and, in response to a follow-up question in comments, even more on novellas.  We hope you enjoy.

On a related note, I’ll be travelling next weekend so we’re not sure if we’ll get a podcast recording session, but we will make every effort to do so. And if we don’t, we’ll make up for it in Columbus!

And we’re at it again. Taking a question from the blog comments, Gary sat down in Chicago on a Friday evening with a glass of red wine and I sat down on a Saturday morning with a cup of coffee, and we discussed the top anthologies and collections of the past 20 years. As usual, we didn’t really discuss it properly, but we did wander far and wide from there.

Young adult science fiction, gender, race, Scott Westerfeld’s Behemoth, the very sad passing of Ralph Vicinanza, Australian SF compared to SF from the rest of the world: these and other things were discussed when Gary and I fired up podcast #20 this morning.  It seemed to go pretty well. We hope you enjoy it!

Things slowly get back to normal as Gary and I jump back into the pod to discuss radical new hard SF, Interzone, Paul McAuley, Stephen Baxter, whether Mundane SF makes any sense, what we’ve been reading and some other stuff in what struck me as we were chatting as a particularly crunchy podcast. I did ask for suggestions on Twitter, but got so involved in this that I didn’t get to them. I’ve made note though, and we’ll get to them next week!