The Coode Street Podcast

Episode 503: Ten Minutes with Suzy McKee Charnas

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Gary talks with Hugo and Nebula Award winner Suzy McKee Charnas about the delights of a public library during lockdown, her own pioneering work in feminist SF and vampire fiction, a new novel about Bram Stoker, returning to the reliable work of Poul Anderson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas A. Disch, and Joanna Russ, and her own forthcoming titles from Aqueduct Press.

Books mentioned include:

• The Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas
• The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas
• Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor
• Reluctant Voyagers by Elisabeth Vonarburg
• Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• Comet's Tale: How the Dog I Rescued Saved My Life by Steven D. Wolf
• Into Oblivion: An Icelandic Thriller by Arnaldur Indridason
• Paper Sun by S.J. Rozan
• Night of the Jaguar by Michael Gruber

Episode 502: Ten Minutes with Tim Pratt

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Hugo award-winning writer and longtime Locus editor Tim Pratt talks with Gary about serving on juries for two different awards in the same year (the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize and the Philip K. Dick Award), worrying about the fires that everyone in California worries about at this time of year, the appeal of mystery and crime fiction, and of fantasy novels that only imply a larger world rather than spelling it out in detail, and his own forthcoming alternate universe novel, Doors of Sleep.

Books mentioned include:

• Doors of Sleep by Tim Pratt
• The Marla Mason Series by Tim Pratt
• The Axiom Series by Tim Pratt
• The Four Profound Weaves by R.B. Lemberg
• Road Out of Winter by Alison Stine
• The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
• Big Sky by Kate Atkinson

Episode 501: Ten Minutes with Chen Qiufan

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

One of China’s most widely-honoured SF writers, Chen Qiufan (or Stanley Chan, for English speakers and as a tribute to Stanley Kubrick) joins Gary for a fascinating discussion of apocalyptic literature seen from a perspective of a culture that views the future as repeating itself rather than ending, the importance shifting patterns of growth to stress employment and sustainability, neuroscience as it might relate to meditation or Buddhism, and the uses of AI (including the language model GPT-2) in fiction as it develops its capacity for natural language.

Books mentioned include:

• Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• The Wastelands by Stephen King
• Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy by Evan Thompson
• AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

Episode 500: Second verse...

For their 500th episode (if you count the shorter “10 Minutes With” episodes they’ve been doing since March), Jonathan and Gary characteristically fail to achieve any sort of clear structure for the discussion but do return to some favourite themes. While we manage to avoid reopening the old canon of worms, we do talk about what science fiction cultural literacy might look like—not in terms of specific works, but in terms of concepts and techniques, and how they might change over time. Would a reader of Gardner Dozois’s first “year’s best” anthology feel any sense of familiarity with Jonathan’s volume from 2020? And as usual, we look at the year so far, some forthcoming books to look for, and the pleasures we’ve had in chatting with new and old friends in our shorter lockdown-era podcasts.

Episode 499: Ten Minutes with Vandana Singh

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Only recently back from several months in India, Vandana Singh joins Gary to talk about what experiencing lockdown was like near Delhi and the hardships of day workers suddenly laid off and walking long distances back to their villages, the challenges to a speculative fiction writer of unexpectedly living in a 'bad science fiction novel' and some of the comforts of reading poetry, a novel set in remote Nagaland, 'magical realism' in the stories of Gogu Shyamala, and even Harry Potter.

Books mentioned include:

• Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh
• When the River Sleeps by Easterine Kire
• Father May Be an Elephant and Mother Only a Small Basket, But... by Gogu Shyamala

Episode 498: Ten Minutes with Elizabeth Knox

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Today Jonathan gets to spend talking to one of New Zealand's finest writers, Elizabeth Knox, who joins the conversation from Wellington (home of the 2020 WorldCon) to talk about living, working and writing during the pandemic, the joys to be found in reading absolutely everything by Diana Wynne Jones and Patrick O'Brian, her new novel The Absolute Book (due in the US in 2021 in a revised edition), and much more.

Books mentioned include:

• The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
• Nothing to See by Pip Adam
• The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North
• The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

Episode 497: Ten Minutes with Karin Tidbeck

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Today Gary is joined by Crawford Award-winning and World Fantasy Award- nominated Swedish author Karin Tidbeck, discussing her remarkable 2010 Clarion class (three Crawford winners!), the audio narrating skills of Robin Miles, listening to Sandman as an audio drama, the work of Garth Nix and Tove Janssen, a fascinating new novel still awaiting English publication, and her forthcoming The Memory Theatre.

Books mentioned include:

• Amatka by Karin Tidbeck
• Jagganath by Karin Tidbeck
• The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck
• The Sandman (audio) by Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs
• The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (narrated by Robin Miles)
• Harrow the Ninth by Tamsin Muir
• The Old Kingdom Series by Garth Nix
• The Moomin books and others by Tove Jansson
• Monsters In Therapy by Jenny Jägerfeld & Mats Strandberg

Episode 496: Ten Minutes with John Crowley

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

World Fantasy Life Achievement winner John Crowley chats with Gary about his oddly prescient horror story “Spring Break” (which he says is his only horror story), the evocative prose of Graham Greene’s thrillers, the terror of Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge, and his own recent collections of essays and stories.

Books mentioned include:

• And Go Like This: Stories by John Crowley
• Reading Backwards: Essays and Reviews 2005-2018 by John Crowley
• This Gun for Hire (aka A Gun for Sale) by Graham Greene
• The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
• The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene
• Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn
• The Invisible Valley by Su Wei (trans. by Austin Woerner)