The Coode Street Podcast

As we move into October and the end of the year begins to come into view, we sit down to talk about whether the SF ghetto still exists, especially after M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and whether SF itself has become thoroughly integrated into the mainstream. We also discuss whether terms like space opera and epic fantasy have meaning beyond the...

As we move into October and the end of the year begins to come into view, we sit down to talk about whether the SF ghetto still exists, especially after M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and whether SF itself has become thoroughly integrated into the mainstream. We also discuss whether terms like space opera and epic fantasy have meaning beyond the...

Coode Street picks up our recent conversation about short fiction with James Patrick Kelly and Michael Swanwick with Cadwell Turnbull, whose excellent short fiction collection All the Hidden Places is one of the highlights of the year and is out this month. As always, our conversation wanders a little, but we touch upon how he assembled the collection, his experiences in both Clarion and an MFA pr...

This week’s episode is a wide-ranging discussion of robots and AI in fiction, and particularly in the work of our two distinguished guests: James Patrick Kelly, whose  The Book of Bots  is just out from Fairwood Press, and Michael Swanwick, whose T he Universe Box  appeared from Tachyon earlier this year. We talk not only about how each author’s treatment of AI themes has evolved over the years, b...

It's been far too long since one of our favorite guests, Garth Nix, has visited us on Coode Street, but with the forthcoming publication of his adult science fiction novel,  Massif , it’s a great opportunity to catch up with one of the world’s leading fantasists. We talk about the different challenges of writing SF or fantasy, how his own military experience informs some key parts of the novel, an...

Time certainly flies. Although it has been nearly four years since we last chatted with Alix E. Harrow, she has quickly become one of our very favourite guests. This week we are delighted to welcome her back. Her novel The Everlasting is currently nominated for both the Hugo and World Fantasy awards, and her excellent first collection of short stories, The Slantwise Histories , will be published i...

Can you believe a storyteller? Ray Bradbury was a consummate storyteller who, in the introduction to his 1950 short story collection The Martian Chronicles , offered a possible origin story for the work. He had, he recalled, been 24 years of age when he read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio, a collection of stories about small-town life.  The book inspired him to wonder if he could do something...

In this week’s episode, we sort of turn the tables on Jonathan to discuss the art of assembling anthologies, and in particular no fewer than four books he has coming out over the next few months: Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Book of the Dead, Vaster Than Empires:, Speculative Fiction of the Eternal and the Ephemeral , and The Locus Best Science Fiction &...

This week, Jonathan and Gary are joined by multiple award winning writer and critic Amal El-Mohtar, whose first story collection  Seasons of Glass and Iron  appeared earlier this year, and whose novella The River has Roots has won Nebula and Locus awards for 2026. We talk about our favorite stories in the collection, a diverse range of writers including Patricia McKillip, J.R.R. Tolkien, Hope Mirr...

Many podcasts far more professional than ours have offered discrete segments covering different topics, so this week we decided to carefully organize the episode—wait, no we didn’t; we’re just rambling again. But we do begin with a small tribute to Jane Yolen, both a great writer and a great friend, which leads into some musings on how reputations are made and sustained. We then touch upon the rec...

Jonathan and Gary are delighted to welcome the wonderful Molly Tanzer , whose new novella And Side by Side They Wander is just out this week. Although it involves apparently benign alien visitors, a post-apocalyptic post-United States, corporate overreach, and a fair bit of space opera, the novella's main focus is art, who really owns it, how we interact with it, and whether even a molecularly exa...

Jeffrey Ford's eight full length collection, Pandemonium Waltz , was published by Lethe Press back in February. Ever since we've been meaning to sit down with him to discuss the new book, his approach to short story writing, how he assembles short story collections, and more. We're delighted to have had the chance this week, to discuss the book, how retirement in rural Ohio is reflected in some of...

This week, Jonathan and Gary sit down and talk some new and forthcoming books, including our mutual choices for favorite book of the year so far. Gary starts by describing a book which he just finished and found particularly moving: The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard , Christopher Priest and Nina Allan, which he says reads more like a novel than a biography, with Prie...

With Gary away at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Florida, and celebrating his 80th birthday (!!!!!), Jonathan sat down to chat with Alexandra Pierce and Ian Mond about why we read books, why we talk about and review them, and three great new books from 2026 that we loved. Along the way, we talked about Johanna Bell's The Department of the Vanishing, S.L. Huang's The L...

As usual, Jonathan and Gary raise a number of thorny questions about reading SF and fantasy, and resolve none of them. Beginning with Jonathan’s account of his recent reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, we speculate on what sort of expectations we bring as readers to novels in which the interiority of the characters is privileged over the SF elements, whether a novel can do both, and whet...

Today Jonathan and Gary are joined by Nebula, World Fantasy,  and five-time Hugo Award winner Michael Swanwick to discuss the origins of some of his stories, the life and craft of the professional writer, and his extraordinary new short story collection, The Universe Box . As always, our thanks to Michael for making time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the conversation!  

As always, the Coode Street Motel Six bestrides continents, so after briefly comparing notes on the weather in Perth and Chicago, Gary and Jonathan get down to it and chat about the subjects of the moment.   How do you talk about books and what was the weather like? The importance of settings in fiction, especially regarding climate and weather, and the broader question of whether readers can ever...

There are snowstorms blowing where Gary is and Jonathan can see rain falling outside in Perth's midsummer, but the Motel Six has been safely relocated and the Gershwin Room is open once again. Conversation starts off, perhaps incoherently, with dystopias and dystopian fiction, segues to Travis Baldree and the somewhat misdescribed notion of cozy fiction, and then wanders here and there before Jona...

Jonathan and Gary kick off 2026 with no guests, but with the sort of wide-ranging ramble that some listeners seem to enjoy, and that others probably gave up on years ago. We talk about some books due in the new year, especially story collections by Samantha Mills, Amal El-Mohtar and others, how story collections can contribute to an author’s career, and whether it’s necessary to read the stories i...

For our year-end discussion of 2025 books, we’re joined by Locus reviewers Ian Mond and Alex Pierce, and distinguished critic and novelist James Bradley. As usual, we mention a lot of authors and titles, and probably forget to mention many deserving others. But you’ll no doubt find some suggestions you hadn’t thought of, and some of our usual digressions about familiar questions of genre, literary...

E.J. Swift 's sixth novel, When There Are Wolves Again, is one of the standout science fiction novels of 2025. For the final instalment of the Coode Street Advent Calendar for 2025, Jonathan chats with Emma about what she has been reading and would recommend, the writing and publication of When There Are Wolves Again, her holiday reading, and what she has coming up next. As always, our thanks to E...

It's December 24, the final day of Advent, and Coode Street has just two more episodes to go before our holiday break. Today, Gary and Jonathan chat with Ursula Vernon about her writing alter-ego T.Kingfisher , about what she's read lately and would recommend, her recent work like Hemlock & Silver , What Stalks the Deep and Snake-Eater , her holiday traditions, and what she's been working on a...

World Fantasy and Ignyte winner Tochi Onyebuchi joins Gary for a brief but wide-ranging discussion that touches upon his genre-hopping 2025 novel Harmattan Season , his fascinating Internet memoir Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet , the virtues of Roberto Bolaño and Dostoevsky, and Tochi’s own work in progress. As always, our thanks to Tochi for making time to talk to us. We hope you en...

Today Jonathan and Gary spend some time talking to Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who write together as "James S.A. Corey", about what they've been reading, what they'd recommend, their seasonal reading and viewing, and their upcoming new novel, The Faith of Beasts . We also touch upon progress on Daniel's third Kithamar novel and their ongoing project to write an entirely new novel right before yo...

As both the Advent Calendar and the year move slowly towards a close, Gary and Jonathan chat with Francis Spufford, author of Golden Hill, Light Perpetual, and the wonderful Cahokia Jazz about what he's been reading, what he'd recommend, his holiday reading traditions and his incredible novel, Nonesuch . As always, our thanks to Francis for making time to talk to us today. We hope you enjoy the ep...