Each year I end up compiling a personal list of the best fiction I’ve read during the year. That list ends up being used as the basis of my annual recommended reading essay for Locus, and for the introduction to my Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year anthology. It somehow always ends up being a chore, one that I fight and struggle with for reasons that make little or no sense.
Partly to prepare for this ordeal, and partly to jog my memory, this weekend Gary Wolfe and I will be doing a special Coode Street Podcast where we will discuss 2014: The Year in Review. Gary and I are going to do actual preparation for this one(!) and we have invited critic and author James Bradley to join us. We hope to have another guest, if possible, but it should be fun discussing it with James. It means at least one of us will be erudite and well informed!
We’re going to be recording the episode on Saturday, 13 December 2014 and it will go out to listeners within 24hrs of being recorded. I’ll be shamelessly using the information provided by all of you in prepping and hope to come up with a few surprises and may be making a major announcement about the future of the podcast!
With the holiday season about to get going in earnest, we thought we’d give you a rough idea of what to look forward to in coming weeks.
Gary and I are still debating on either doing a special ‘Books to Look Forward to†or “Best of 2014†episode. If we do either of those it will air on the weekend of December 13, 2014.
Following that episode, we will go into a brief hiatus when we will air three episodes we recorded in Washington DC. The likely order is:
21 Dec 14: Live with Helen Marshall and Robert Shearman
28 Dec 14: Live with Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
 4 Jan 15: Live with Guy Gavriel Kay
We would then be back with a fresh episode on the week on 11 January 2015. We have some exciting plans which we hope you’ll enjoy.
This is a backup issue of Episode 211 of the Coode St Podcast featuring Kij Johnson. Â We are making some changes to how the Coode St Podcast is published. Â From 3 January 2015 episodes will no longer be cross-posted to my personal blog and the Notes from Coode St RSS feed will become inactive on iTunes.
We recommend moving your subscription to http://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/ so that you continue to receive Coode St each week. Thanks!
The Coode Street Podcast is fortunate to have a small group of guests who have appeared on the show more than once. This week we welcome back our most regular visitor, the wonderful Kij Johnson, who brings us up to date on the weather in Kansas, what she’s been writing, and on re-imagining our genre’s past.Â
It was enormous fun talking to Kij and we’d like to thank her for making time on a chilly Saturday evening to talk to us on Coode Street. We apologise for some minor technical issues. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast, and will be back next week with more!
Note: This is a reissue of the original episode, which had some issues.
Due to a technical issue with uploading to our podcasting hosting service we have withdrawn episode 211 of the Coode Street Podcast. It will be reissued as soon as we can make a reliable copy available. Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.
