I wasn’t able to make Ray Nayler‘s launch event last month for his new novella The Tusks of Extinction at D.C.’s Lost City Bookstore, but we were able to get together for lunch just a few days later — and you can join us at the table.

Nayler is the author of the Locus Award-winning debut novel The Mountain in the Sea, which was also a finalist for the Nebula Award and the L.A. Times Book Awards’ Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction. He began publishing speculative fiction in 2015 in Asimov’s, and since then, his stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Vice, Nightmare, and other magazines. His story “Yesterday’s Wolf” won the 2022 Clarkesworld Readers’ poll, and the same year, his story “Muallim” won the Asimov’s Readers’ Award, his story “Father”, in French translation, won the Bifrost readers’ award, and his novelette “Sarcophagus” was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

In addition to his speculative fiction, Ray has published in many other genres, from mainstream literary fiction to comics. Those have appeared in Ellery Queen, Crimewave, Hardboiled, Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, Queen’s Quarterly, the Berkeley Fiction Review, and other journals. He’s also a widely published poet, with work in the Atlanta Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Weave, Juked, Able Muse, Sentence, and many more. He is currently Diplomatic Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at The George Washington University.

We discussed how his time living outside the U.S. helped him become a better science fiction writer, why he feels the greatest effect of having written The Mountain in the Sea was a culinary one, the reason we agree our favorite part of writing is rewriting, the sad results of his accidental Facebook experiment, whether his mammoth memory behavior is based on scientific facts or is purely speculative, why we’ll likely never be able to truly resurrect extinct species, how changes in culture can affect evolution, the train trip where he received career advice from a stranger he didn’t realize was Neil Gaiman, why we aren’t totally in control of our writing destinies, how he’s haunted by the ghost of an alternate version of himself, plus much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our lunch at Hilo Poke and Sushi —

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And here’s what loosened our tongues at Hilo Poke and Sushi —

Miso Soup

Scott’s Sushi Dinner

Ray’s California Rolls

Ray’s Pork Cutlet Curry Udon

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Coming up next — my deli dinner with Glenn Hauman, who’s written Star Trek and X-Men stories, has worked for DC Comics, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Apple Comics, and other publishers, and also, according to his official bio blurb, is what happens when a Young Turk of publishing gets old.

Thanks for listening!