Welcome to the first of two episodes recorded during the massive pop culture event Awesome Con, held each year in Washington D.C. My first guest of the weekend was Patrick O’Leary, whose debut novel, Door Number Three (1995), was named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly.

His second book, The Gift (1997), was a finalist for both the World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award. The Impossible Bird (2002) was selected as one of Locus’s top novels of the year. His new novel, 51, was just published in February. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as SCI Fiction, PostScripts, and Electric Velocipede, and anthologies like Mars Probes and We Think, Therefore We Are. Many of them have been collected in Other Voices, Other Doors (2000) and The Black Heart (2009). And even if you’ve never read Patrick O’Leary, you’ve certainly heard him, because he wrote the poem “Nobody Knows It But Me,” which was used in the 2002 advertising campaign for the Chevrolet Tahoe and recited in the commercial by James Garner.

We discussed the way his new novel 51 is similar to The Great Gatsby, why he believes his books will crumble if he attempts to describe them, the perils and pleasures of pantsing (and how his stories often don’t get any good until the 15th draft), the tragedy of being an invisible creature, our mutual fears of what aging might bring, his love for Marvel Comics (and especially the Silver Surfer), how Laura Ingalls Wilder introduced him to literature, the way reading Kurt Vonnegut taught him there were no rules, the two science fiction greats who literally left him speechless, and much more.

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Welcome to the last of three Eating the Fantastic episodes recorded over the Memorial Day weekend at the 56th annual Balticon, the first time that con was able to occur in the flesh in three years because of … well, you know why.

You’ve already shared sushi with Wen Spencer, followed by an Afghan dinner with Gwendolyn Clare, and now it’s time for breakfast with David Gerrold, who I first encountered when I was 12, because I saw the Star Trek episode scripted by him, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” when it first aired in 1967. And they say 12 is the Golden Age of science fiction, right?

But David is so much more than that famed episode. He’s the author of more than 50 books, hundreds of articles and columns, and numerous hours of television. His TV credits include episodes from Star Trek (such as the aforementioned “The Trouble With Tribbles” and “The Cloud Minders”), Star Trek Animated (“More Tribbles, More Troubles” and “Bem”), Babylon 5 (“Believers”), Twilight Zone (“A Day In Beaumont” and “A Saucer Of Loneliness”), Land Of The Lost (“Cha-Ka,” “The Sleestak God,” “Hurricane,” “Possession,” and “Circle”), Tales From The Darkside (“Levitation” and “If The Shoes Fit”), Logan’s Run (“Man Out Of Time”), and others.

His novels include When HARLIE Was One (which I believe was the first prose of his I read, at age 17), The Man Who Folded Himself, The War Against The Chtorr septology, The Star Wolf trilogy, and The Dingilliad young adult trilogy, the Trackers duology, and many more. The autobiographical tale of his son’s adoption, “The Martian Child,” won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette of the Year and was the basis for the 2007 movie, Martian Child.  He was the 2022 winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award, which was presented during Balticon.

We discussed what he means by “humility in the face of excellence,” the curse of fame and why J. D. Salinger may have had the right idea, how the more you know the slower you write, the challenge of living up to having won the Heinlein Award (and why Heinlein once called him “a very nasty man”), the scariest story he ever wrote, how Sarah Pinsker helped him understand what he really felt about Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” the kind of person he might have been had he not moved to L.A. as a kid, the fannish way he found out he’d been nominated for a Hugo Award, how it feels to already know what the headline of his obituary will be, and much more.

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Are you ready to return to Balticon? I hope so, because it’s time for you to take a seat at the table with the second of three guests I was able to chat and chew with over the Memorial Day weekend. Last episode, you were able to eavesdrop as I shared sushi with Wen Spencer, and this time around you get to join me at the Afghan restaurant The Helmand with writer Gwendolyn Clare.

Gwendolyn Clare’s debut novel, Ink, Iron, and Glass, and its sequel, Mist, Metal, and Ash, compose a duology published in 2018 and 2019 about  a young mad scientist with the ability to write new worlds into existence. Coming up in November is In the City of Time, the first book in a duology about three science prodigies on a time-traveling adventure to save the Earth. Her short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others, and her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling Award.

Her short story “Tasting Notes on the Varietals of the Southern Coast” was reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. She holds a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and a PhD in Mycology — the last of those making me wish I got around to asking her to assuage my fears about a relative of mine who picks and eats wild mushrooms … but hey, that will have to be dealt with at a future meal during a different con.

We discussed the important lesson COVID taught her about her career, whether her most famous short story reads differently during these pandemic times, the identity of the science fiction writer I was startled to learn had been her high school geometry teacher, what the novels of Elizabeth Bear taught her about writing, the short story concept she decided to instead turn into what became her first published novel, how she gets into the mindset to write in the Young Adult genre, the amazing cleanliness of her first drafts, the pantsing fingerprints she sees on Stephen King, the many iterations recent writers have made to John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?,” and much more.

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I was thrilled to be back at an in-person Balticon last month, the first since 2019. And though the con’s now over, here at Eating the Fantastic, it continues, at least for the next three episodes. I hope you’ll join me as I chat and chew with three writers who were gracious enough to join me at the table during Balticon, the first of which was Wen Spencer, one of this year’s Special Guests.

Wen Spencer is the author of more than a dozen science fiction and fantasy novels and is perhaps most known for her Elfhome series, which began with Tinker (2003), winner of the Sapphire Award.   She’s the 2003 winner of what was then known as the John W Campbell Award — now the Astounding Award — for Best New Writer — plus the 2002 winner of the Compton Crook Award for her novel Alien Taste, the first book in her Ukiah Oregon saga. The books which followed in that series are Tainted Trail (2002), Bitter Waters (2003), and Dog Warrior (2004). Her standalone novels include A Brother’s Price (2005), Endless Blue (2007), Eight Million Gods (2013), and The Black Wolves of Boston (2017). Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Transhuman, World Breakers, Turn the Other Chick, and Chicks and Balances.

We discussed her origins as a writer of Pern fanfic, the similar faux pas we each made during our early days in fandom, how a friend inspired her professional career by lending her a stack of poorly written books, the dream which gave birth to her Compton Crook Award-winning first novel Alien Taste, the true reason the novel is her fiction form of choice, the impossibility of ever making something perfect, what her agent really means when he says “well, you could do that,” why it’s so important to be able to write more than one type of book, whether she knows how her series will end, and much more.

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This episode of Eating the Fantastic is a serendipitous one, brought to your ears because writer Steven R. Southard happened to stop by my neck of the woods for brunch while on a drive from Maryland to Texas. That resulted in us meeting on a sunny May morning at Bonnie Blue Southern Market & Bakery in Winchester, Virginia, which has been serving food in what was previously an Esso Station since 2012. They have excellent fried chicken, biscuits, waffles, pastries and a lot more, so I recommend you drop by if you’re ever in the area.

Steven R. Southard is particularly fascinated by alternate and secret histories, and has written more than a dozen installments in his What Man Hath Wrought story series, starting in 2010 with The Wind-Sphere Ship, and most recently with After the Martians in 2020. His short stories have also appeared in magazines such as Curiosities and Steampunk Tales, and anthologies like Avast, Ye Airships, Quoth the Raven and Not Far From Roswell. With Kelly A. Harmon, he edited the anthology 20,000 Leagues Remembered, published in 2020. He and I have frequently appeared as co-panelists discussing the craft of writing at Balticon, ChessieCon, and elsewhere.

We discussed how an early meeting with Isaac Asimov had him hoping he could be just as talented and prolific, why it took him 15 years of working on a novel before he realized he was meant to be a writer of short stories, how Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea changed his life, why alternate and secret histories attract him so (as well as the stories in that genre I never got around to writing), his “snowflake” method for plotting short stories, the secrets to coming up with good ideas for theme anthologies, what movie and TV depictions of submarines get wrong (and which ones get it right), and much more.

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This time around, I invite you to take a seat at the table on a sunny patio for lunch with writer John Appel.

John’s debut novel Assassin’s Orbit, published last year, was a finalist for the 2022 Compton Crook Award. He’s a former US Army paratrooper, a long-time information security professional, a historical fencer, and a life-long gamer who’s written the occasional tabletop RPG adventure. He co-edited the anthology Skies of Wonder, Skies of Danger along with Mary Alexandra Agner. John’s also a graduate of the Viable Paradise workshop and a founding member of the Maryland Space Opera Collective writing group.

We met for lunch at the White Oak Tavern, which is in the Enchanted Forest Shopping Center in Ellicott City, Maryland, and if there was ever a proper place to record an episode of Eating the Fantastic, an Enchanted Forest certainly sounds like it.

We discussed how pitching his debut novel as “Battlestar Galactica meets Golden Girls” got him an agent, why his background in table-top RPGs might be the reason he writes novels rather than short stories, how he deals with the “candy bar” scenes of his plots, the way critique groups and sensitivity readers can help make books better, how to juggle multiple viewpoints and still have them all be equally compelling, the political aspects of his novel which make it a different read than it would have been when it was first begun, his particular set of skills which helped bring fight scenes alive, and much more.

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We’re about to do a little time traveling, you and I. That’s because I worked for both Marvel and DC Comics from the mid-’70s through the early ’80s, and my guest this episode is Alex Segura, a writer whose latest novel, Secret Identity, is a noir murder mystery set during the mid-‘70s comics industry I lived through.

Segura seems like the perfect person to tackle that particular overlapping Venn diagram of genres. He’s written murder mysteries before — including five novels in the Pete Fernandez series, beginning with Bad Beat in 2016 and concluding with Miami Midnight in 2019, plus the six-part Lethal Lit: A Tig Torres Mystery podcast series. He’s also worked for Archie Comics and DC Comics, and is currently the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Oni Press.

Some of his more well-known comics work includes his Archie Meets Kiss arc — he also had the gang meet the Ramones and the B-52s — plus his “Occupy Riverdale” story. His Black Ghost miniseries was named one of the five new comic book series for the end of summer by the New York Times. He also supplied an origin story for everybody’s favorite new Star Wars character in the novel Poe Dameron: Freefall.

In a better world, I’ve have been able to make a day trip to NY so we could have an in-person conversation, but that’s not the world in which we live at the monent, so he grabbed Chinese food at Taystee Garden in Kew Gardens, Queens, I did the same from Evergreen Chinese Restaurant in Inwood, West Virginia, and we chatted with several hundred miles between us.

We discussed why Secret Identity could have been his first novel but wasn’t, the reason he’s so fascinated by the ’70s comics industry (and how he was able to get it right), the purpose of the book’s period-specific comic book illustration interludes, how Duffy Vohland — the guy responsible for turning me into a comics pro — almost played a much larger part in the story, how to make mysteries work, the way his editor helped to make the book better, what we can expect in the sequel, how Archie Andrews introduced him to comics — and how he felt writing that legacy character himself, writing an origin story for the Star Wars character Poe Dameron, and much more.

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It’s time once again to step into the time machine, as this episode’s guest, Paul Kupperberg, is one of the two people in comics I’ve known the longest. He, along with former guest of the podcast Paul Levitz, ran fanzine sales at Phil Seuling’s 1971 4th of July weekend Comic Art Convention. We were both 16 then.

Paul’s another one of those guests I’d planned to sit across the table from during a day trip north sometime during the past two years, but that couldn’t happen, so to prevent the state of the world from stealing from us the conversation we would have had in better times, this became another one of the remote episodes I started doing once our world narrowed in early 2020, urged on by my Patreon supporters, who felt as much of a need for community during this difficult period as I did.

A lot has changed over the past half century since Paul and I met, as he’s written more than 1,000 short stories and comic book stories during those years. Among the characters whose adventures he’s scripted are Superman, Supergirl, Superboy, the new Doom Patrol, Green Lantern, the Justice League of America, Aquaman, Conan, and many others. He also scripted something near and dear to my heart — the first appearance of Keith Giffen’s Ambush Bug character in DC Comics Presents #52 (Dec. 1982). He wrote the syndicated The World’s Greatest Superheroes newspaper comic strip with José Delbo from 1981–1985. He’s the author of more than three dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Same Old Story, JSA: Ragnarok, Direct Comments: Comics Creators in Their Own Words, and Paul Kupperberg’s Illustrated Guide to Writing Comics. He’s been an editor at DC Comics, WWE Kids’ Magazine, and the Weekly World News.

Paul ordered in Butter Chicken from Curry & Hurry in Riverside Connecticut, I ran over to Spice Connexion in Martinsburg, West Virginia for take-out Lamb Rogan Josh, and I hope you grab some Indian food so you can better pretend to be part of the gabfest.

We discussed which superhero starred in his first favorite comic book, the reasons we’re in agreement when it comes to the Stan vs. Jack debate, why his introduction to Superman had nothing to do with comics, what we each felt was lacking in our own early comic book writing, the surprising identity of the DC editor whose books sold the best, what caused legendary artist Don Heck to curse him out, the special challenges of writing comic strips, how he needed to get ready (or not) before writing all those legacy characters, what it was like rebooting Doom Patrol, which Archie character’s death upset him so much he had to step away from the keyboard, and much more.

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The past two years of Eating the Fantastic were quite different due to COVID, and not only because of the conventions and other events which were cancelled, allowing only six in-person episodes out of 22 in 2020, and 12 of 27 in 2022. But also lost were the weekend trips I’d expected to make to New York and other cities, which kept me from many of the guests I’d hoped to host for you.

And since it doesn’t look as if I’ll make it to Manhattan any time soon, I decided I’d waited long enough for a face-to-face get-together Paul Witcover. To prevent COVID from stealing the conversation we should have had long ago, he picked up a pulled pork sandwich from New York’s Hometown Bar-B-Que, I grabbed a three-meat platter from Bonnie Blue Southern Market & Bakery in Winchester, Virginia, and even though there were hundreds of miles between us, we shared an entertaining lunch.

Paul Witcover‘s first novel, Waking Beauty (1997) was short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. He’s also written five other novels: Tumbling After (2005), Dracula: Asylum (2006), The Emperor of All Things (2013) and its sequel, The Watchman of Eternity (2015), plus most recently, Lincolnstein, just out from PS Publishing.

His 2004 novella “Left of the Dial” was nominated for a Nebula Award, and his 2009 novella “Everland” was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in Twilight Zone magazine, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Night Cry, and other venues. A collection of his short fiction, Everland and Other Stories, appeared from PS Publishing in 2009, and was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. He’s been a frequent reviewer for Realms of Fantasy, Locus, New York Review of Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction at UCLA Extension and at Southern New Hampshire University, where he is the Dean of the Online MFA program.

We discussed the reason the pandemic resulted in some of the best years of his freelance career, the way he thrives as a writer when dealing with the boundaries of historical fiction, why his new novel Lincolnstein is “exactly what you think it is,” how he writes in yesterday’s vernacular without perpetuating yesterday’s stereotypes, what can and can’t be taught about writing, the reasons he felt lucky to have attended Clarion with Lucius Shepard, the effect reading slush at Asimov’s and Twilight Zone magazines had on his own fiction, what Algis Budrys told him that hit him like a brick, and much more.

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Library of Congress curator Sara Duke and I were supposed to have lunch two years ago, way back in March of 2020, but then … something happened. I suspect you can guess what that something was. We finally managed to break bread — or rather, share Pad See Ew — last week at D.C.’s Young Chow Chinese restaurant.

Sara Duke has been at the Library of Congress for more than 30 years, the past 23 as the curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Art in the Prints and Photographs Division. She’s in charge of cartoons, documentary drawings, and ephemera. Starting with Blondie Gets Married in 2000, she’s been responsible for curating many exhibits relating to popular culture, including Comic Art: 120 Years of Panels and Pages, and most recently, Geppi’s Gems.

We discussed the first piece of artwork she longed to get her hands on after a 13-month pandemic absence, our joint loathing of slabbed comics, the misconceptions many people have about the Library of Congress, the things most people no longer remember about Blondie, her comic book exhibit cancelled by COVID, the serendipitous way a PhD in 17th century Irish history led to her becoming a curator, her early (and continuing) love of MAD magazine, and much more.

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