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 —

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 279 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.

Here’s what you would have seen us nibbling had you been with us at Chris’s Cafe —

My Full English Breakfast

Farah’s Small English Breakfast

If you enjoyed this episode and want to support my mission of breaking bread with creators of the fantastic while letting you eavesdrop, there are several ways you can help bring this podcast to the attention of potential new listeners looking for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comics ear candy —

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Coming up two weeks from now on the podcast, you’ll be able to head out for a Birmingham Balti with Paul McAuley — whose writing has been recognized with an Arthur C. Clarke Award, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Philip K. Dick Award, and a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award — as we discuss his life and his most recent novel Loss Protocol.

Thanks for listening!