It’s time to say farewell to this year’s Balticon with the second of two conversations I recorded for you there, the first being last episode’s BBQ lunch with Mark L. Van Name. This time around you’ll eavesdrop as I chat and chew with award-winning writer Somto Ihezue, who at the time of our conversation was both a Nebula and Locus Award finalist for “We Begin Where Infinity Ends,” published last year in Clarkesworld. Ihezue went on to win the Locus Award for that novelette shortly thereafter.

He was also nominated in 2023 for a British Fantasy Award — the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Tor: Africa Risen Anthology, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside Magazine, Podcastle, Escape Pod, Strange Horizons, Poetry Magazine, Cossmass Infinities, Flash Fiction Online, Nightmare, OnSpec Magazine, Omenana, Africa In Dialogue, Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology, The Year’s Best Anthology of African Speculative Fiction, and others.

He’s also been involved on the other side of the writer/editor equation, as Acquiring Editor at Android Press and Associate Editor for Cast of Wonders.

We discussed why fireflies matter, how the social media algorithm led him to writing workshops, finding the courage required to write his award-winning story, why the literature of the fantastic is his chosen playground, how he brings the geography of his stories to life, the startling fact his first published short story was also the first he ever wrote, the way the Clarion workshop experience made his writing better, the importance of community, the way readers speak about his poetry vs. the way they speak about his prose, how his editing gigs helped make his own rejections less bothersome, plus much more.

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I captured two fascinating Eating the Fantastic conversations for you during last month’s Balticon. I wish I could have squeezed in a third, but planning for and hosting the podcast’s 10th anniversary party there — where I served up 26 dozen donuts in the con suite — exhausted some of my spoons.

First up, my lunch with award-winning writer Mark L. Van Name, recorded on the con’s opening day several hours before programming began. Balticon was the perfect place to break bread with Van Name, because 18 years earlier there, he won the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel for his 2007 book One Jump Ahead. That was the first of his Baen Books about Jon and Lobo, which include Slanted Jack (2008), Overthrowing Heaven (2009), Children No More (2010), and No Going Back (2012). His short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, When the Music’s Over, Full Spectrum 3, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, and many more.

Van Name is more than his many short stories and novels, for he was also the cofounder of the Sycamore Hill Writer’s Workshop with previous guest of the podcast John Kessel, as well as the editor of the critical magazine of short fiction, Short Form.

We discussed his first short story sale to a 1979 Clarion classmate of mine, why it sometimes takes him decades before he feels a story’s ready to send out, the reason he still has a massive comic book collection (and why I don’t), the comic book which helped save his life, the reason he doesn’t require advances on his novels, his mixed feelings about writing workshops, the 17 minutes Harlan Ellison spent savaging one of his stories, why you have to let go of caring what readers make of your writing, how his John and Lobo series was born, the way he balanced a demanding day job with the writing life, plus much more.

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Two Hugo Award-nominated podcasts collide in the fifth and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during this year’s Eastercon. John Coxon and Alison Scott, two-thirds of the award-winning team behind Octothorpe (absent their equally entertaining cohost Liz Batty) took me on walkabout to a nearby Nando’s so I could experience its peri-peri chicken for the first time — and we recorded not just our meal, but the hikes there and back again.

We discussed the many first-time Eastercon attendees I encountered who were there due to their podcast, Nando’s place in British culture and why it was chosen to be our venue for this episode, what they’re willing to reveal about cohost Liz Batty in her absence, how the coming of COVID-19 kickstarted the creation of Octothorpe, why they didn’t launch an old-school fanzine instead, how the first episode wasn’t even originally intended to be the first episode, why we’re still here considering 90% of podcasts don’t make it past three episodes, how to comment responsibly on fandom while being a part of fandom, the reason their letters of comment section is so important, what changed about the show once they realized people were actually listening, advice for those who’d like to start podcasts of their own, plus much more.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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