Out in the real world, I’m straddled between last weekend’s Balticon and next weekend’s StokerCon, but here on the Eating the Fantastic timeline, I’m still back attending Eastercon. So please join me in Birmingham and take your seat at the table for my dinner with John Jarrold.

Jarrold ran three science fiction and fantasy imprints in the UK since 1988, and over the years worked at Orbit Books, Macdonald Futura (now Little, Brown UK), Legend Books, Random House UK, Simon & Schuster, and others. Starting in 2002, he began acting as a script doctor for agents and new authors, and did freelance editing for publishers including Hodder & Stoughton, Random House, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan, Transworld, Simon & Schuster, Orion/Gollancz, Constable & Robinson, and Time Warner. In 2004 he launched the John Jarrold Literary Agency, which he still runs today.

I could provide a list of the authors he’s worked with over the years, but it would make for a shorter list if I told you who he hasn’t worked with.

We discussed his first Eastercon 53 years ago, his “obsessive” love for J. R. R. Tolkien, the best commercial deal he ever did, how to dispassionately judge the writing of people you already know, his editorial encounter with Michael Caine, the bidding war over George R. R. Martin’s  A Game of Thrones, how he learned to write editorial revision letters writers would understand, the ways in which working with authors of science fiction is different than in the wider world of publishing, when it’s time for an author to reinvent themselves under a pseudonym, splitting one’s time between the business and artistic sides of publishing, what he means when he says getting published “is the jam on the bread, it’s not the bread,” the sorts of submissions he’s seeing too much and too little of at his agency, plus much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Brightsmith on the Water — (more…)

My guest this third of five conversations recorded last month during the UK national convention Eastercon is Charles Stross, an 18-time Hugo Award-nominated writer who’s won three times for his novellas. I’ve been reading him for nearly four decades, ever since his first Interzone short story publication in 1987, but he really blew me away with his 2001 Asimov’s novelette “Lobsters,” which seems to have made an impression on the rest of the world as well, for it went on to become the first of his stories to be nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula.

He’s also won Locus Awards for both Best Novel and Best Novella, and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His novels have also won the Kurd Lasswitz and Italia Awards. The Regicide Report, the final book in his Laundry Files series, was released in January. His other series include Merchant Princess and the Singularity. Plus he’s got a whole new series in the works, one for which I got an advance peek, and you’ll hear us talk all about it in the conversation which follows.

We discussed the twelve “novel-shaped objects” he wrote before making his first professional sale, what changed in his life which meant instead of taking three years to write one novel he could write three novels in one year, why back at the beginning of his career he considered himself the “failure to launch” of the Interzone generation of writers (and how that changed), how to best take the temperature of critique group criticism, why it was time to wrap up his Laundry Files series (and who he had to become in order to be able to write that finale), the way the opening sentence of an as yet unfinished novel became the seed for a new series in progress, how his love for Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat novels ties into his next project, the evolving nature of convention-going for long-time attendees, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Cafe Soya — (more…)

One of the first things I did after deciding to attend this year’s Eastercon in Birmingham was research the city’s culinary specialties, which is how I learned about the Birmingham balti, so famous the city has even applied for cultural heritage protection for the cuisine. On the first night of the con, award-winning writer Paul McAuley and I headed over to Shababs — which reportedly serves up the best — to check some out.

McAuley has published twenty-five novels — the most recent of which, Loss Protocol, was released in February — as well as more than a hundred short stories. A twenty-sixth novel, Heaven’s Grand Design, will follow. His fiction has resulted in five nominations and a win for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, seven nominations and a win for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, two nominations apiece for the Philip K. Dick Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, winning each of those once, as well as multiple nominations for the  British SF Association Award and British Fantasy Award.

He’s also co-edited an anthology, In Dreams, with Kim Newman, and published a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. He wrote a regular book review column in Interzone magazine back in the 1990s, and since then has written book and film reviews and pieces of journalism for a variety of publications, including the Guardian and Independent newspapers, Crime Time, Arc magazine, New Scientist, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

We discussed his fascination with James Joyce and how it played out (or didn’t) in his own writing, why he’s thrilled the first short story he sold to a pro market was never published, the reasons he loves Los Angeles, what he learned as a scientist which helped him write better science fiction, why he compared his writing style to Raymond Chandler’s, the way his world-building takes place during writing and not before, whether or not his new novel should be considered science fiction, what I feel that hovel has in common with Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, our shared love of the ambiguous ending, what he learned by rereading his short fiction to assemble a career-spanning collection, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Shababs — (more…)

The first of five conversations I captured across the pond in Birmingham during Eastercon was an Eating the Fantastic reunion, because Farah Mendlesohn last appeared on the podcast on Episode 126. Back then, we discussed their newly released book The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, which I was pleased went on to receive a Hugo nomination for Best Related Work.

This time around, you’ll get to hear us discuss their newest work, Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore (Luna Press), which I hope will be recognized with its own Hugo nomination next year.

Farah’s a seven-time nominee for the Hugo Award, winning (with Edward James) in 2005 for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge University Press). Farah also won a World Fantasy Award in 2017, which they wrote with Michael M. Levy. They’re also the author of Rhetorics of Fantasy (Wesleyan University Press), On Joanna Russ (Wesleyan), The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction (McFarland), Diana Wynne Jones: The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature (Routledge), and Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars (Palgrave Macmillan).

We discussed whether their Hugo-nominated Heinlein book changed the conversation about that author, if there’s such a thing as an inverse of The Suck Fairy, why it might be wrong to chat about The Female Man while nibbling on toast, the reason Russ’s novel took so long to get published, the probable purpose of the self-critique within the book, the difficulties in communicating with cross-cultural metaphors, why The Female Man is a version of The Christmas Carol, the reason the book isn’t Postmodernist but Modernist, why I failed to pick up on the novel’s Jewishness, what surprised them most during their rereading of the novel, the reason Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ was so painfully hard to write, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Chris’s Cafe — (more…)

Seven years, one month, and 15 days before the meal on which you’re about to eavesdrop, Alan Smale and I got together to chat about his Clash of Eagles trilogy. Now that he’s completed yet another trilogy, we decided to grab lunch during Awesome Con to discuss how his Apollo Rising books came to be.

Smale writes alternate history and hard SF. His novella of a Roman invasion of ancient America, “A Clash of Eagles”, won the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and his series of novels set in the same universe, Clash of Eagles (2015), Eagle in Exile (2016), and Eagle and Empire (2017), are available from Del Rey (US) and Titan Books (UK and Europe). His Roman baseball collaboration with Rick Wilber, The Wandering Warriors, came out from WordFire Press (2020), and Hot Moon, his alternate-Apollo “technothriller with heart,” set entirely on and around the Moon, was launched by CAEZIK SF & Fantasy in July 2022, followed by sequel Radiant Sky in November 2024 and the concluding volume in the Apollo Rising series, Burning Night, in November 2025.

Smale has also sold over fifty pieces of shorter fiction to Asimov’s and other magazines and original anthologies. His short story, “Gunpowder Treason,” set in London in 1605, the lead story in Tales from Alternate Earths Vol. III from Inklings Press, won the 2021 Sidewise Award. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Lightspeed and Journey Planet, and he wrote a regular column about scientific and historical turning points for Galaxy’s Edge.

Born and raised in England, he lives in Maryland and recently retired from a career as an astrophysicist and data archive manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He also sings bass and serves as Business Manager for high-energy vocal band The Chromatics, who have performed at various science fiction conventions (D.C. Worldcon, Balticon, Shore Leave, Farpoint) and were Music Guests of Honor at Philcon.

We discussed the three projects he’d told me in 2019 he was going to write next (and what became of them), how what was originally intended to be a standalone novel turned into his latest trilogy, the synergy of writing an alternate history about the Apollo space program while working at NASA, how the constraints imposed by science helped improve his plot arc, the way astronaut personalities have changed across the decades, how to write alternate history to be entertaining both for those who know actual history and those who don’t, the advice he wishes he could give his younger self, how we don’t really dislike info dumps (only the ones which aren’t done well), and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Mariscos 1133 restaurant — (more…)

This episode’s conversation came together thanks to Facebook, which is where I learned the multifaceted Steven H Silver would be visiting Washington D.C. earlier this month. That was an opportunity I couldn’t let pass. So late one morning, after he’d wandered the National Air and Space Museum, and I’d enjoyed the Monets at the National Gallery of Art, we got together for lunch — one to which you’re now invited.

Silver, a 21-time Hugo Award nominee, was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB Books. His novel, After Hastings, was first published in 2020. In 1995, he created the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference 5 times, as well as serving as the Event Coordinator for SFWA. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7. Steven has maintained In Memoriam lists for Worldcon, the Nebula Conference, and the World Fantasy Con for several years.

We discussed our shared status as record-breaking losers, my morbid suggestion about what he’ll need to do upon my death, the reason he found The Silmarillion more interesting than The Lord of the Rings, how meeting Mel Brooks and other luminaries made him more at ease once he began attending science fiction conventions, the way a cancelled contest resulted in his first short fiction sale, what it was like to be in a writing workshop taught by Gene Wolfe, the allure of the alternate history subgenre (and how it differs from secret histories), what he learned publishing a novel in the middle of a global pandemic, the Easter eggs he scattered through After Hastings, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Dolan Uyghur restaurant — (more…)

When is an Awesome Con episode of Eating the Fantastic not an Awesome Con episode of Eating the Fantastic? When the con’s going to keep your potential guest too busy to record on site and you figure out a way to chat and chew anyway.

Salinee Goldenberg is the author of the novels The Last Phi Hunter and Way of the Walker, the second of which was released only a few weeks before we recorded. Both were published by Angry Robot. Previously, she worked at Bethesda Softworks creating narrative trailers for games such as Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Dishonored, and now produces videos for Minecraft. But those aren’t her only artistic outlets, for she also paints and plays in the punk band SexFaces.

We discussed what it was like having to deliver her second published novel on a deadline after having had her entire life to write the first, the Final Fantasy fanfic she wrote as a kid, why she’s attracted more to novels than short stories, how getting critiqued in the gaming industry prepared her to deal with writing workshops, why she considers herself a recovering pantser, how writing the ending of her new novel was almost like being in a fever dream, why she likes reading bad reviews, how to know when it’s necessary to kill your darlings, the way to write battle scenes so readers can follow the fight choreography, how being a guitarist in a punk rock band impacts her writing, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Bangkok 54 — (more…)

Most of the time when I invite you to tag along as I chat and chew, it’s because I’m at a convention and I’m hoping to replicate for you some of the joy I discovered back at the beginning of my con life — how sneaking away from those cons with friends was as much fun as the cons themselves. And with my con season about to rev up again, there’ll be plenty of episodes like that soon to come your way.

But this time around, I took advantage of a trip to Manhattan earlier this month to catch a theatrical adaptation by the Elevator Repair service of James’s Joyce’s Ulysses at the Public Theater to squeeze in lunch with one of the best editors and best people I know — Liz Gorinsky.

Liz has been a seven-time nominee for the Hugo Award in the Best Editor: Long Form category, an honor won in 2017. Liz also won one of George R. R. Martin’s Alfie Awards in the same category in 2015. After a lengthy career at Tor Books where Liz edited such novelists as Annalee Newitz and Jeff VanderMeer and acquired short fiction for the company’s online component, Liz founded Erewhon Books in 2018, and acted as president and publisher. Liz stepped down from that role in 2022 to pursue personal projects. Liz is also an ardent LARP-ist — which might not even be a word — and fan of immersive theater, so our conversation veered into those topics as well.

We discussed whether either of us would have turned out as you know us without having grown up in New York, the early ambitions to be a comic book editor, the legendary comic book couple who were childhood neighbors, whether or not there’s any difference between editing fiction and non-fiction, how to gracefully navigate the convention community, the first edit letter which made Liz nervous, what makes Liz realize a manuscript shows potential, how to cleanse your palate when reading slush to be sure what you think is good really is good, self-defining success as a writer, what told Liz it was time to take on the publisher role, the appeal of immersive theater, why LARPing isn’t acting, what we might have told James Joyce if we were editing Ulysses, the many reasons whatever you’re doing you should be doing for love, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Superiority Burger — (more…)

My guest this episode is someone you know even though you don’t know you know him — because, among many others things, Chris Kalb, artist, art director, and pulp magazine maven, designed the podcast icon for Eating the Fantastic, so you met him when you clicked on that flying saucer hoovering up a donut, burger, and chicken leg with its tractor beam. He’s also designed covers for two of my short story collections — the horror collection These Words are Haunted, and my recent science fiction one, 101 Things to Do Before You’re Downloaded.

But Chris is a lot more than the projects he was willing to tackle for me. He’s a Charles M. Schulz Award-winning cartoonist and designer whose work has appeared in books and magazines, on TV and online, and in educational content for the last 35 years. His illustrations have appeared in such books such as ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy and Other Misheard Lyrics, Cooking Rocks: Rachael Ray 30-Minute Meals for Kids, and He Loved Me, He Loves Me Not. That last title, written by comedienne Lynn Harris, spawned the relationship super-hero Breakup Girl, whose subsequent internet advice column and web-comic (one of the first!) were adapted for TV by Oxygen when they launched in 2000.

From 2001-2008, Chris was the designer of the Syfy Channel magazine during the station’s peak period. For the last 13 years, Chris has been using all of his combined talents in storytelling, art, design and coding to craft innovative classroom experiences for Amplify Education, a pioneer in digital curriculum.

Chris has also been a life-long fan of pulp characters such Doc Savage, The Spider, Operator #5, and G-8 and His Battle Aces. Beginning in 2007, he has been able to give back to pulp fandom as the art director and publisher of Age of Aces Books, reprinting the very best in aviation pulp fiction from titles like Daredevil Aces, Sky Birds, Wings, and Flying Aces.

We discussed the comic book company and superheroes he and his brother created when they were just kids, why he once thought Chris Ware was his nemesis, the Batman comic which influenced him the most, how his father caused him to fall in love with Doc Savage, the secret origin of his romantic advice superheroine Breakup Girl, the sophistication  of pulp era writing, one theory as to why Doc Savage never made it as a successful comic book series, the college comic strip which won him a Charles M. Schulz Award, the problem the slabbing of pulps has caused within the collecting community, the pulp premium so rare none may have survived, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us at Veselka — (more…)

The L.A Worldcon will shortly be opening nominations for the Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. If you’re eligible to nominate, I hope you’ll consider my Eating the Fantastic podcast in the category of Best Fancast.

Last year, you were invited to eavesdrop on 28 conversations with creators of the fantastic. Below are links to all 2025 episodes so you can have a taste and decide whether the podcast — which launched 10 years ago today — is your kind of ear candy. I hope you enjoy your time at my tables!

Split a pastrami sandwich with Martha Thomases in Episode 244 of Eating the Fantastic

Share shawarma with the award-winning Eric Choi in Episode 245 of Eating the Fantastic

Munch on pepper chicken masala with Larry Hama in Episode 246 of Eating the Fantastic

Chat and chew with Shannon Robinson on Episode 247 of Eating the Fantastic

Have a Nashville hot chicken sandwich with Robert Greenberger in Episode 248 of Eating the Fantastic

Mangia mussels in Baltimore’s Little Italy with David Simmons in Episode 249 of Eating the Fantastic

Rip into roti with writer Tim Paggi in Episode 250 of Eating the Fantastic

Wolf down lamb with Carolyn Ives Gilman in Episode 251 of Eating the Fantastic

Pig out on pork belly with Jarrett Melendez in Episode 252 of Eating the Fantastic

Break for brunch with writer Adeena Mignogna on Episode 253 of Eating the Fantastic

Toast writer/editor Craig Laurance Gidney on Episode 254 of Eating the Fantastic

Feast on oysters with Kemi Ashing-Giwa in Episode 255 of Eating the Fantastic

Bite into blueberry pancakes with Silvia Moreno-Garcia in Episode 256 of Eating the Fantastic

Devour a seafood tower with Samantha Mills in Episode 257 of Eating the Fantastic

Binge on burnt ends with Aimee Ogden in Episode 258 of Eating the Fantastic

Pig out on pork belly with Curtis C. Chen in Episode 259 of Eating the Fantastic

Rip into a lobster roll with Benjamin Rosenbaum in Episode 260 of Eating the Fantastic

Slurp ramen with Mur Lafferty on Episode 261 of Eating the Fantastic

Bite into Cheesy Pav Bhaji with Karen Heuler in Episode 262 of Eating the Fantastic

Tear into tacos with Richard Butner on Episode 263 of Eating the Fantastic

Slurp soup dumplings with Eugenia Triantafyllou on Episode 264 of Eating the Fantastic

Tackle Texas BBQ with John Picacio on Episode 265 of Eating the Fantastic

Polish off pasta with Lara Elena Donnelly in Episode 266 of Eating the Fantastic

Brunch on blueberry pancakes with Natalia Theodoridou in Episode 267 of Eating the Fantastic

Settle in for an Ethiopian feast with Alaya Dawn Johnson in Episode 268 of Eating the Fantastic

Sample samsa with Naomi Kritzer on Episode 269 of Eating the Fantastic

Savor shrimp — and Steve Ditko — with comics writer/editor Jack C. Harris on Episode 270 of Eating the Fantastic

Dish over dumplings with George Gene Gustines in Episode 271 of Eating the Fantastic

I thank you for your consideration!