In a world without COVID-19, I’d be recovering from jet lag right about now after my trip to Wellington to attend CoNZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction convention. But that’s not what’s happening, because the con went virtual, as so many cons have this year, which meant I attended at home in my pajamas.

Which also meant there were no restaurant outings during that con with creators of the fantastic from which I could bring back conversations to share with you. But thanks to a push from some of my Patreon supporters, I decided — the chats I’d planned shouldn’t be lost. And so although my guests and I couldn’t be seated at the same table sharing the same food and breathing the same air, Eating the Fantastic goes on, even if that means sharing meals across thousands of miles and a dozen or more time zones.

Last episode, I had a long-distance meal with the award-winning New Zealand writer and editor Lee Murray, my dinner and her lunch the following day — and this episode I have breakfast while Australian writer Stephen Dedman has dinner 12 hours in my future.

Stephen has published more than 100 short stories, some of which I was privileged to publish back when I was editing Science Fiction Age magazine. You can find many of those stories in his collections The Lady of Situations (1999) and Never Seen by Waking Eyes (2005). His novels, which include The Art of Arrow Cutting (1997), Foreign Bodies (1999), Shadows Bite (2001), and others, have been Bram Stoker, Aurealis, William L. Crawford, and Ditmar Award nominees. He’s also written role-playing games, stageplays, erotica, and westerns. And he at one time worked as a “used dinosaur parts salesman,” a job which had me extremely curious — and as you listen to us chat and chew, you’ll find out all about it.

We discussed how the Apollo 11 moon landing introduced him to science fiction, what his father told him which changed his plan to become a cartoonist, the huge difference the Internet made in the lives of Australian writers, his creative trick for getting his first poem published, what acting taught him about being funny in the midst of tragedy, his former job as a used dinosaur parts salesman, the way page one tells him whether he’s got a short story or novel idea, how Harlan Ellison became the first American editor to buy one of his stories, and much more.

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