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…)

Continuing to not let COVID-19 fracture the community I’ve been a part of for the past 50 years, I invite you to join me for another nibble which would have taken place during CoNZealand had the pandemic not forced the 78th World Science Fiction convention to go virtual.

I’d previously made plans to chat and chew with three guests on the ground in Wellington, but since that proved impossible, I decided to go virtual, too, urged on by my Patreon supporters. And so, during my previous two episodes, you were able to eavesdrop as I dined with Lee Murray in New Zealand and Stephen Dedman in Australia. This time around, we’re off to Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England for tea and scones with Farah Mendlesohn.

Farah was a Hugo Award finalist this year in the category of Best Related Work for her book The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, and had previously been nominated in that category for The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction, and On Joanna Russ. She won a Hugo (with Edward James) in 2005 for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, as well as a World Fantasy Award in 2017 for Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, which she wrote with Michael M. Levy.

She’s also edited anthologies, including Glorifying Terrorism, Manufacturing Contempt: An Anthology of Original Science Fiction, which she created to protest laws introduced by the British Government she saw as restricting free speech. She was the chair of the Science Fiction Foundation from 2004-2007, served as President of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts from 2008-2011, and is currently an Associate Fellow of The Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy.

We discussed the reasons Robert A. Heinlein resonated with her, how her early and current readings of Heinlein differ, why the science fiction of the ’30s was far more politically radical than that of the ’40s and ’50s, her deliberately controversial comment about Ursula K. Le Guin, the circumstances under which she’s more interested in the typical rather than the groundbreaking, that period during the ’20s when everyone was fascinated by glands, the one Heinlein book she wishes we’d go all back and reread, our joint distaste for fan policing, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation — (more…)