With the fall season of Coode Street underway, Jonathan and Gary sit down with the brilliant Ray Nayler, whose first novel The Mountain in the Sea has just been published. We touch upon the many themes of the novel, from the problems of alien communication to artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, the ethics of science, and corporate malfeasance—not to mention lots of octopuses.
We also chat about his eclectic reading habits, from his early passion for Shakespeare to allusions in his novel as varied as Mary Shelley and Jack London. He also discusses his relationship to genre and how his reading and writing fit into the considerable demands of his professional career.
Last Tuesday I arrived at Perth Airport, ‘fresh’ from a really enjoyable trip to the United States. During the two weeks I spent in Chicago and San Francisco, I got the chance to renew old friendships and make new ones. I got to enjoy Chicon 8, to see a bit more of Chicago, and basically to remind myself, after three years at home, what it is to be away. It was a special joy to spend time with Ellen and Gary. I wasn’t in the best of health in San Francisco — something hit me hard that had me wheezing and coughing — but I feel like I’m slowly rebounding. I also got some new sekrit news (which is always fun to have).
I’m still spinning my wheels, as I have been all year, but I’m determined that this week will see me actually write new book proposals, keep my promises to people on book-related stuff, and maybe even make some time to work on my taxes. First, though, something also long overdue. This morning Marianne and I are driving down to Yallingup for a quick two-night stay. It’s Marianne’s first time out of town since before the first lockdown in 2020 and it’s our first time away as a couple since 2014 (and only the fourth time since 2000). A good chance to reconnect. The plan is to simply relax, so I’ll be mostly offline, I think, while away.
After far too many weeks of an unscheduled summer hiatus, Jonathan and Gary are back with a discussion of the recent Worldcon, which felt in many ways like a return to classic Worldcon form. But then we amble into a discussion that ranges from whether there are too many awards in SF to the question of whether “hard SF” is still a viable category that means what it once did—”playing with the net up”–and how the multiverse seems to have joined time travel and even moon colonies as narrative devices which has more or less escaped the rigours of SF to become features of mainstream novels and media franchises. Also, as always, a bit about who and what we’ve been reading.
For the handful of listeners who might be nostalgic for those earlier Coode Streets which were mostly just disorganized rambles, this week we return to form—or lack of form, as the case may be.
We do mention Rich Horton’s recent re-reads of pre-Hugo SF classics, and his contention that 1953 was a high point in SF publishing, but then get into questions of why it was just an impressive year (partly due to a backlog of SF writing that hadn’t previously been widely available in book form), which in turn leads us to another discussion of the familiar periods of SF history still make much sense given the broadening of the field in the last half-century. Are there other Golden Ages? Are we in one now? How do today’s readers decide which earlier SF is worth reading? Is the overall quality of SF stronger today than ever, or are we simply applying different or more stringently literary standards? This leads to a digression about exciting books coming out later this year, and a number of other topics that we challenge you to even try to keep track of. But at least we had fun.
This week we’re joined by the distinguished, multiple award-winning John Kessel, whose collection The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel is recently out from Subterranean Press, representing John’s four-decade career as an SF writer, teacher, editor, scholar, and workshop leader. We touch upon not only his short fiction, but novels like The Moon and the Other and Pride and Prometheus, his early studies under James Gunn, his thematic anthologies co-edited with James Patrick Kelly, and what really happened in SF during the 1980s.
As always, we’d like to thank John for taking the time to talk to us and hope you’ll enjoy the episode.
With the fall season of Coode Street underway, Jonathan and Gary sit down with the brilliant Ray Nayler, whose first novel The Mountain in the Sea has just been published. We touch upon the many themes of the novel, from the problems of alien communication to artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, the ethics of science, and corporate malfeasance—not to mention lots of octopuses.