There’s a lot to celebrate this month. First is the welcome news that the fabulous Hot Key Books edition of Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron is now out in the UK and Australia! Sarah Odedina and the Hot Key team, who are busy launching a brand new book imprint, have been wonderful to deal with (they even sent me champagne and chololates to celebrate!), and they’re doing a brilliant job with the book.
If you’re in Australia or the UK please consider heading out to a bookshop near you – chain or independent – and check out the beautiful book and the great stories in it. Of course, if you’re in the US you can get the first edition of the book from Random House and Jim Thomas, who have been similarly fabulous.
I have to say it’s been a joy and a privilege working with everyone associated with the book, and I only hope I’m lucky enough to get to work with them again.
This week we were joined in the Waldorf Room by Campell Award winning author Kathleen Ann Goonan, where we discussed the future of science fiction, teaching SF, nanotechnology, women writing hard science fiction, her new collectionAngels and You Dogs, the Nanotech Quartet, and her most recent novel, This Shared Dream. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!
Posted by lastshortstory on September 22, 2012 0 comments
Welcome to the second episode of Last Short Story. This month Ian Mond and I are joined by Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth co-founder Tansy Rayner Roberts to discuss Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s After:Â Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia.
As part of the pre-season for the podcast, we continue to refine the format. This time we accept that we’re not going to get through nineteen stories, however fine they may be, in an hour podcast, so we restrict ourselves to discussing these six stories, all of which rank amongst the year’s better stories, and several of which are clearly amongst the best:
“The Segment,” Genevieve Valentine
“Valedictorian,” N.K. Jemisin
“Blood Drive,” Jeffrey Ford
“The Easthound,” Nalo Hopkinson
“Fake Plastic Trees,” Caitlin R. Kiernan
“The Marker,” Cecil Castellucci
These aren’t the only good stories in the book, by any means, but in the collective opinion of the podcast panel they easily justify the time spent reading the book.
During Episode 115 of the Podcast we discussed Paul Kincaid’s review essay, “The Widening Gyre” (originally published by the LA Review of Books). In the essay, while reviewing three ‘best of the year’ anthologies, Paul asked whether science fiction was suffering from exhaustion and, more importantly perhaps, whether writers had lost confidence that the future was comprehensible and therefore storyable.
Our original conversation didn’t cover the subject well, so we invited Paul to join us in the Gershwin Room to discuss the essay and the issues surrounding it. Our thanks to Paul for being such a generous guest and, as always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.
We are back after an unexpected break over the WorldCon weekend. We intended to have a podcast for you, and to record many, many exciting interviews. Instead, life took over and we did something else.
However, we were back in the Gershwin Room this weekend to discuss the Hugo Awards, Paul Kincaid’s LA Times article on the exhaustion of science fiction, and steampunk, through the lens of two very fine stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan (“Goggles (c.1910)” from Steampunk 3) and Nick Mamatas (“Arbeitschraft” from The Mammoth Book of Steampunk).
Welcome to the second episode of Last Short Story. This month Ian Mond and I are joined by