The Coode Street Podcast

As we approach the October Country, Jonathan and Gary start this week’s podcast discussing Gary’s new two-volume set from the Library of America,  American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s  (which you can order right now) and end with discussing the challenges of editing Jonathan’s new best science fiction of the year anthology series from Saga Press. It’s not all shameless self-...

Welcome to the first episode of the second season of The Coode Street Roundtable, a monthly podcast from Coode Street Productions where panellists James Bradley, Ian Mond, Gary K. Wolfe, and Jonathan Strahan, joined by occasional special guests, discuss a new or recently released science fiction or fantasy novel. Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline This month James, Ian, Gary and Jonat...

After acknowledging that we failed to record a single podcast during the Dublin Worldcon, Jonathan and Gary compare notes about the con and the general wonderfulness of being in Ireland, than discussed perhaps the most debated bit of news emerging from Dublin: the renaming of the John W. Campbell award following the passionate acceptance speech by Jeanette Ng. This raised the issue of whether it’s...

Just before Gary K Wolfe and I went to Dublin for the WorldCon we recorded a short episode. We've been too busy to publish until now. And we do have new plans for new episodes. We will be back!!!

This week marks the publication of Jonathan’s new hard-SF anthology  Mission Critical , the title of which reminded Gary of the first SF serial he read, Hal Clement’s Close to Critical. This lead, by our usual process of carefully structured random free association, to a discussion of Clement as an example of an author whose fiction is not widely read anymore, but whose influence nevertheless show...

This week Jonathan and Gary are back, fitting another episode in between travel, work, and family commitments. Gary opens up with a thoroughly reasonable discussion about writers from the 1990s and 2000s who may have published major works but have fallen from sight in recent years, while Jonathan attempts to get Gary interested in a new segment. Along the way there's discussion of the history of a...

With the Nebula Award winners about to be announced , we took a look this week at the question of whether science fiction has demonstrated much continuity of theme and style since the 1969 Nebulas, or whether the field has essentially reinvented itself in the last few decades. But before we even get around to that, we note the death of bestselling author Herman Wouk, whose only science fiction wor...

After a much longer than expected hiatus, we're back (sort of)! Gary's been working and travelling and Jonathan's been working and planning to travel and it's made it very difficult to squeeze recording time in.  Or even to plan recording time. Still, for a moment, early on Mother's Day in Australia and late in the evening in Chicago, Gary and Jonathan stop to discuss the books they've been readin...

For our 350th(!) episode, Jonathan and Gary basically just ramble on. We begin with the question of how long to stick with a novel which seems to be going off the rails, and comment a bit on what different kinds of readers expect from long novels. Later we move on to questions about anthologies, and what to expect from recent anthologies of Chinese, Korean, South Asian, and Israeli science fiction...

This week, we are joined by Nebula Award-winning Sarah Pinsker , whose first story collection  A Song for a New Day , will appear from Berkley Books in September. We talk about the challenges of a dual career as writer and songwriter/performer—and the differences in audience interactions between the two—as well as her early reading and writing in the field, her creative writing classes in college...

As usual at this time of year, Jonathan and Gary sit down to discuss the beginning of the awards season, and in particular the recently announced Nebula finalists and the fact that the Hugo nominations remain open for another couple of weeks. Needless to say, this leads off in various directions about whether there is really more first-rate short fiction these days, or merely a broader range of ve...

Charlie Jane Anders joins Jonathan and Gary to discuss her second novel, The City in the Middle of the Night , which will be in shops during the coming week. Her powerful and engaging new novel follows her award-winning debut, All the Birds in the Sky, and we chat about following that novel, her hopes for the new book, and much more. As always, our thanks to Charlie Jane for taking the time to tal...

This week, as part of Coode Street's experimental trio of shorter episodes, Clarkesworld publisher Neil Clarke joins Jonathan and Gary to discuss the state of short fiction in 2018. How is the field doing artistically? How is to doing in publishing terms? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? We take half an hour to talk about all this, trends in the field and more.  The fourth volume of Neil's...

This episode is our more-or-less annual discussion with Locus magazine’s editor-in-chief Liza Groen Trombi, with whom we chat about the Recommended Reading List which appears each February in the magazine’s Y ear In Review issue .  How is the list compiled, who contributes to it, and perhaps most important of all, what’s it for?  How does it differ from other "best of the year" lists? What does it...

And we're back with our 344th episode, which one of us incorrectly thought was our 343rd because we counted 342 twice. Ugh. Apologies for the confusion! This week: The rise and rise of the time travel story Dr Who has been telling time travel stories for fifty years. Robert A. Heinlein made his name with a time travel story. Kids grow up watching Back to the Future. Time travel is a well-establish...

Every episode starts with a blank slate, even when perhaps it should not. This week we start with the recent announcement that William Gibson has been named as this year’s  Damon Knight Grand Master  by SFWA, which is well-deserved. Gibson's most famous novel, Neuromancer, won the Philip K. Dick Award back in 1985 (along with a slew of other awards).  This, in turn, takes us to the just-announced...

At the beginning of the new year, Jonathan and Gary compare lists of books they’re looking forward to in the new year, beginning with some novels appearing within the next few weeks (Charlie Jane Anders’s The City in the Middle of the Night, Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Alastair Reynolds’s Shadow Captain), and venturing further into the year with debut novels, sophomore novels sequels,...

After another long hiatus, Jonathan and Gary return with a ramble saying farewell to 2018 (actually recorded when it was still 2018 in Chicago and already 2019 in Perth). This time we look back on some of our favourite novels, novellas, collections, anthologies, and nonfiction from the past year, agreeing enthusiastically about Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City, Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the...

The 2018 World Fantasy Convention was held in Baltimore, Maryland over the first weekend of November. People from all over the globe gathered, including Gary and Jonathan, to engage in discussion, appreciate art, and generally share their love of the fantasy genre.  Somewhere in there, Gary and Jonathan found time to sit down with Andy Duncan to discuss his brand new short story collection, Agent...

A partial copy of this went out yesterday. Here's a full repost. Apologies to anyone downloading this one twice.

With the 2018 World Fantasy Convention  just weeks away, Gary and Jonathan sit down to discuss the upcoming convention, the life achievement recipients, nominees and much more. This episode is a bit of ramble and includes digressions on questions like whether this really is an outstanding year for story collections (with new collections from N.K. Jemisin, Michael Bishop, and others) or if great co...

Worldcon 76  in San Jose, California this past August was a busy time. Thousands of science fiction and fantasy writers, readers, artists, publishers, and fans of every stripe travelled across the country and, in some cases, around the world to celebrate the best in SF. We (Gary and Jonathan) had a wonderful time while we were there and managed to record four special episodes. Our final conversati...

Worldcon 76  in San Jose, California this past August was a busy time. Thousands of science fiction and fantasy writers, readers, artists, publishers, and fans of every stripe travelled across the country and, in some cases, around the world to celebrate the best in SF. We (Gary and Jonathan) had a wonderful time while we were there and managed to record four special episodes. This third episode s...

Readers talk to other readers. They share information about the books and stories they love. They recommend. It's as natural as breathing. Those recommendations lead to a broader commentary, to lists and canons and all sorts of other things. This week Jonathan and Gary discuss the way we talk about books, the nature of recommending, and much more. As promised, this episode contains recommendations...

A re-release of episode 335. This should be 53 minutes long. --------------------------------------------   Worldcon 76  in San Jose, California this past August was a busy time. Thousands of science fiction and fantasy writers, readers, artists, publishers, and fans of every stripe travelled across the country and, in some cases, around the world to celebrate the best in SF. We had a fine time wh...