After pizza with José Pablo Iriarte and Eggs Benedict with Fonda Lee, Eating the Fantastic’s culinary conversations at DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention continue with an excursion for Thai food — and a tasty chat courtesy of Usman T. Malik.

Usman T. Malik won the British Fantasy Award for his novella The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, which was also nominated for both the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards. His story “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family” won the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction. His stories have been published in such magazines as Strange Horizons, Black Static, Nightmare, and Tor.com, as well as anthologies such as Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and others. His collection Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan, was published in 2021.

We discussed why the first pandemic year was his most prolific period ever as a writer, how the Clarion Workshop helped him decide what kind of writer he wanted to be, our shared concerns over revising our early stories, the way his medical training gives him an intriguing advantage as a writer, how every love story is a ghost story and every ghost story is a love story, what it was like running Pakistan’s first science fiction writing workshop, why he prefers Stephen King to Dean Koontz (and what that taught hm about his own writing), the cautionary tale told to him by Samuel R. Delany, how writers teach readers the way they should be read, and much more.

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Here’s what we nibbled at Soi 38 while we chatted —

Goong Pao
grilled shrimp, fresh chili and lime sauce

Scott’s Gaeng Hang Lay
slow-roasted pork belly, hang lay curry, fresh ginger, sticky rice

Usman’s Ped Krob Kra Prow
crispy roasted duck, Thai basil, fresh chili, garlic sauce

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Please join me two weeks from now for another culinary conversation I harvested from Worldcon, when I lunch with Daryl Gregory, whose novella We Are All Completely Fine won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award, and whose novel Revelator was published last summer.

Thanks for listening!