Out in the real world, DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, is two months behind us in the rearview mirror … but here at Eating the Fantastic, it goes on. And now that you’ve eavesdropped as I’ve chatted and chewed with José Pablo Iriarte, Fonda Lee, and Usman T. Malik, it’s time for you to join Daryl Gregory and me as we have lunch at Dolan Uyghur restaurant.

Daryl Gregory’s first novel, Pandemonium (2008), won the Crawford Award and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His novella We Are All Completely Fine (2014) won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. His short story collection Unpossible and Other Stories was named one of the best books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly. His novel Spoonbenders (2017) was a Top 20 Amazon Editor’s Choice, an Audible.com’s editors choice for the year, and an NPR best book of the year. His most recent novel is Revelator, which was published last August. His comics work includes Planet of the Apes, The Green Hornet, Dracula, and the graphic novel The Secret Battles of Genghis Khan.

If you’d like a tiny taste of Daryl before taking a seat at the table for our full meal, check out what he had to say while eating a raspberry coffee cake donut during the 2018 Nebula Awards weekend.

We discussed how he celebrated the two books he published during the pandemic, what caused him to say about his latest novel, “I like to split the difference to keep everyone as unsatisfied as possible,” the narrative technique which finally unlocked the writing of that book (and why it made Revelator more difficult to complete), how our mothers responded to our writing, the way marketing affects the reading protocols of our stories, how listening to Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm argue about one of his stories freed him as a writer, the promise a murder mystery makes to a reader, his “Mom Rule” for Easter eggs, the way he tortured a comic book artist with an outrageous panel description, how to play fair when writing a science fiction mystery where anything can happen, what Samuel R. Delany told him which helped him make his first sale to F&SF, how he doesn’t understand why everybody doesn’t want to be writers, the way his writing gets better during the times he isn’t writing, Gardner Dozois’ “ladder of sadness,” and much more.

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Here’s what we nibbled at Dolan Uyghur that day —

Kawa Samsa
oven-baked bun stuffed with butternut squash, onions, red and green bell peppers,
black pepper, and house spices, and sprinkled with sesame seeds

Scott’s Royal Laghman with Lamb
stir-fried onions, cabbage, mushrooms, green and red peppers,
and tomato topped hand-pulled chewy noodles.

Daryl’s Korma Chop with Beef
uyghur-styled signature fried noodles with chives, onions, red bell peppers

Baklava
fine flour, egg, pistachio, lemon salt, sugar, and butter

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Please join me two weeks from now for the final conversation I brought back from the 79th World Science Fiction Convention in Washington D.C., when I lunch with Natalie Luhrs, a two-time Hugo Award nominee for her incisive and occasionally controversial fan writing.

Thanks for listening!