It’s time to say farewell to this year’s Nebula Awards weekend, following our lunch with Aimee Ogden and dinner with Curtis C. Chen.

This episode you’ll be able to eavesdrop on my lunch with Benjamin Rosenbaum, who’s been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Harper’s, Nature, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and many other venues, and as a result has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. He’s the author of the short story collection The Ant King and Other Stories, and the Ennie-nominated Jewish historical fantasy tabletop roleplaying game Dream Apart.

His most recent novel is The Unraveling (2021), which first appeared in Germany three years earlier. The Ghost and the Golem, his 480,000-word Jewish historical fantasy interactive novel set amidst the pogroms of 1881, was a Nebula Award nominee in the category of Game Writing that weekend, so as you listen, you can think of Benjamin as Schrödinger’s nominee, existing in a state of many possibilities at once. He is also the co-host of the podcast Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans.

We discussed the perhaps true/perhaps whimsical reason he ended up in the science fiction field rather than literary publishing, why the story he found the most difficult to sell became his most-read work, how he gamified the submission/rejection process to get into Clarion, the way all stories set in the future are being read in translation, the reason he couldn’t write for a while after his first Nebula nomination, the moral and aesthetic reasons the story of Ghost and the Golem ended up as a game rather than a novel, why he believes “I am very much a child of Chip Delany,” the fascinating differences between the German and English versions of his novel The Reckoning, the intricacies of turning games into novels and novels into movies, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for seafood at Earl’s Premier —

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 259 previous episodes.

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Here’s what you would have seen us nibbling had you been with us at Earl’s Premier —

Jalapeño-Artichoke Spread
lump crabmeat, three cheeses, butter crackers

French Fries

New England Lobster Roll
poached lobster, mayonnaise, chive, split-top Bun

Bangs Island Mussels
white wine, butter, garlic, fresh herbs

Earl’s Oyster Mascot
as seen on its napkins

Banana Pudding
nilla wafers, banana, vanilla pudding, whipped cream

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Coming up two weeks from today will be the first of three episodes recorded during Readercon, where you’ll be able to have dinner with Mur Lafferty, whose novel Infinite Archive, the third book in The Midsolar Murders series — following Station Eternity (2022) and Chaos Terminal (2023) — was released last month.

Thanks for listening!