The year’s Glasgow Worldcon marked the 50th anniversary of my first Worldcon, and I had as much fun this time around as I did then. One big difference — five decades later I have a podcast, which means you get to share in some of that fun, too — such as joining me for breakfast with writer, editor, and engineer Wole Talabi.

Wole Talabi is the author of the critically acclaimed Nommo Award-winning novel Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon — which was also a finalist for the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Ignyte Award — plus was named one of the best books of 2023 by The Washington Post.

He’s actually a three-time winner of the Nommo Award – because he also won in 2018 (for “The Regression Test”) and 2020 (for “Incompleteness Theories”). He’s been a finalist for the Hugo Award for his novelette “A Dream of Electric Mothers,” a story which also won him the Sidewise award for alternate history. His fiction has appeared in such magazines as Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, and Clarkesworld, and anthologies such as The Big Book of Cyberpunk, Africa Risen, and Nowhereville: Weird Is Other People. Many of those stories may be found in his collections Incomplete Solutions (2019, Luna Press) and Convergence Problems (2024, DAW Books).

We discussed his love of combining contradictory ideas, why failing is an important step toward success, how optimism can be a choice (and why making that choice could also make the world a better place), how to convince others who might fear hurting your feelings you truly want their honest criticism, whether AI could ever actually be intelligent or create art, what he means when he says he often writes “two or three people in a room science fiction,” how a friend’s gift of a story seed led to the longest piece in his new collection, the things he learned from writing his first novel which are helping him write his second, the secret to writing successful flash fiction, the accidental catalyst which launched his editing career, the stubbornness that keeps him going both on the page and in the ring, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for breakfast at Cafe Gandolfi, one of the city’s oldest family-owned restaurants —

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts — or wherever you choose to consume your podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 238 previous episodes.

2) Listen via the RSS feed of http://eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com/rss on the device of your choice.

3) Or simply use the embed below.

And here’s what loosened our tongues at Cafe Gandolfi —

Wole Talabi’s Cullen Skink

Scott’s Full Scottish Breakfast

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Coming up two weeks from now — I head out for fish and chips with Paul Cornell, who started out writing Doctor Who fan fiction, which led to him writing canonical Doctor Who novels, audio plays, and comics, and who this year was presented with the Terrance Dicks Award for lifetime achievement in Doctor Who writing from Doctor Who Appreciation Society!

Thanks for listening!