It’s time for the second of three episodes recorded during my recent trip to Quincy, Massachusetts for Readercon, following up on last episode’s lunch with horror writer John Langan, and preceding next episode’s dinner with comic book writer and old Marvel Bullpen pal Don McGregor. This episode, you’ll get to sit at the table with the award-winning writer Rachel Pollack.

We had lunch on the final day of Readercon at Pho Pasteur. This Quincy restaurant is a 2017 spin-off of the original Boston Vietnamese venue which has been open since 1991, and since that cuisine is one of her favorites, I thought we should give that venue a try.

Rachel Pollack is someone I’ve been connected to for a third of a century, even since I ran her story “Lands of Stone” in a 1984 issue of Last Wave, a small press magazine I edited and published. But she’s gone on to do so much more since then!

Her novel Unquenchable Fire won the 1989 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and her novel Godmother Night won the 1997 World Fantasy Award. Her other novels include Temporary Agency, which was a 1994 Nebula Award nominee. Her comic book writing includes an acclaimed run on Doom Patrol, as well as New Gods and Brother Power the Geek. She is also an expert on the Tarot and has published many books on the subject, including a guide to Salvador Dali’s Tarot deck. Her comics and Tarot loves blended when she created the Vertigo Tarot Deck with writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean.

We discussed why Ursula K. Le Guin was such an inspiration, the reason celebrating young writers over older ones can skew sexist, what Tarot cards and comic books have in common, how 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t a science fiction movie but an occult movie, why Captain Marvel was her favorite comic as a kid (Shazam!), the serendipitous encounter which led to her writing Doom Patrol, how she used DC’s Tomahawk to comment on old Western racial stereotypes, the problems that killed her Buffy the Vampire Slayer Tarot deck, how she intends to bring back her shaman-for-hire character Jack Shade, and much more.

Here’s how you can rip into those chicken wings with us— (more…)

I just returned from the San Jose Worldcon, which I guess means it’s time to start thinking about what’s next. And one thing that’s next is the Baltimore Book Festival, held in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

There’ll be more than 100 exhibitors there this year, and one of them will be the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. SFWA members will gather under a tent for three full days of programming , and I’ll be there for two of those days. (I hope to attend the competing Capclave on Friday.)

Here’s where and when you’ll be able to find me pontificating—

Saturday, September 29, 4:00 p.m.
I’ve Seen Your Face Before
From John Kessel’s Pride & Prometheus to Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad of Black Tom” to Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife to our panelists’ own work, authors discuss how it can be a fascinating and rewarding experiment to ask new questions of others’ characters, and to take a page from their stylebooks. What does it take to put a new spin on a character readers recognize? 
with Ruthanna Emrys, Theodora Goss, Nibedita Sen, Vivian Shaw, Jon Skovron

Saturday, September 29, 6:00 p.m.
The Speculative Table: Beyond Stew and MREs
Every character needs to eat, but food is more than just sustenance. It interacts with culture, identity, class, gender, and power. How does SFF deal with those intersections? Which books acknowledge the effort (or future ease?) of putting food on the table? Whose menus are represented, and why?
with Denise Clemons, Lara Elena Donnelly, Marianne Kirby, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez, Nibedita Sen

Sunday, September 30, 6: 00 PM
HELP! I loved ____! What should I read?
Ever reach the end of a great book (or movie or TV show) and find yourself at a loss for how to follow it? Our panelists are at your service to suggest the book you’ll love next based on your taste.
with Andy Duncan, Jonathan P. Brazee, Marianne Kirby, Day al-Mohamed

I hope to see you there!

After six episodes, the Nebula Awards weekend is now in the rearview mirror, and it’s time to move on to the first of three recorded during my recent trip to Quincy, Massachusetts for Readercon. I’ve attended every Readercon since it began in 1987 save one, and that year, when I was off covering the San Diego Comic-Con for the Syfy Channel, I was so sad to be missing out on my friends, I sent a live-sized photographic standup of myself so people could snap selfies with me and post them online to cheer me up.

Luckily, last month, the real flesh-and-blood Scott Edelman was able to attend, though, yes, there were probably some who would have probably preferred the flat me, and I’ve returned with many hours of ear candy for you, starting with John Langan.

John Langan wrote the poetic horror novel The Fisherman, which was probably my favorite book of 2016. And I obviously wasn’t the only one who felt that way, because it won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel the following year. His short fiction has been published in magazines such as Lightspeed and Fantasy & Science Fiction, anthologies such as Lovecraft’s Children and Poe, plus many other venues.

His debut short story collection, 2008’s Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, went on to become a Stoker Award nominee. He and I may be the only two people in the history of the planet to write zombie stories inspired by Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”—his 2008 story “How the Day Runs Down” and my 2001 story “Live People Don’t Understand” tackle that theme in very different ways. He’s a co-founder and on the Board of Directors of the Shirley Jackson Awards.

We discussed how reading Conan the Barbarian comic books as a kid made him hope he’d grow up to be a comic book artist, why his evolution as a writer owes as much to William Faulkner as it does to Peter Straub, what he learned about storytelling from watching James Bond with his father and Buffy the Vampire Slayer with his wife, the best way to deal with the problematic life and literature of H. P. Lovecraft, the reason his first story featured a battle between King Kong and Godzilla, his process for plotting out a shark story unlike all other shark stories, why a writer should never fear to be ridiculous, what a science experiment in chemistry class taught him about writing, his love affair with semicolons, that time Lucius Shepard taught him how to box, the reason the Shirley Jackson Awards were created, and much more.

This episode’s venue was about a 15-minute Uber ride from the Readercon hotel. We had lunch by the water at Tony’s Clam Shop,which has been in business along Wollaston Beach since 1964, and is worth a visit if you happen to be in town.

Here’s how you can share some fish and chips with us— (more…)

Farewell to Pittsburgh and hello to JY Yang in the sixth and final episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during this year’s recent Nebula Awards weekend. If you missed the five other culinary chats from that event, check out my dinners with Kelly Robson and Matthew Kressel, lunches with Alyx Dellamonica and Ellen Klages, and the lightning-round Donut Jamboree.

JY Yang is the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.Com Publishing, which so far includes The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, and The Descent of Monsters, with a fourth still to come. Their short fiction has been published in more than a dozen venues, including Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld. And not only had The Black Tides of Heaven been on the Nebula Awards ballot that weekend, but it’s also on this year’s Hugo Awards and World Fantasy Awards ballots as well.

In previous incarnations, they’ve been a molecular biologist; a writer for animation, comics and games; a journalist for one of Singapore’s major papers, and a science communicator with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research.

We met for Sunday brunch that weekend at Casbah, which offered a Mediterranean-inspired menu filled with comfort food. I’d heard good things about those Sunday brunches, and what I’d heard turned out to be true, because that morning’s braised lamb and eggs was the most umami-filled meal I had all weekend, and probably my favorite dish while in Pittsburgh.

We discussed why they consider themselves “a master of hermitry,” the catalyst that gave birth to their award-nominated Tensorate Universe, why they think of themselves as terrible at world-building, how their dislike of the Matt Damon movie The Great Wall gave them an idea for a novel, the surprising results after they polled fans on which of their works was most award-worthy, their beginnings writing Star Trek and Star Wars fan fiction, why they never played video games until their 30s, the Samuel R. Delany writing advice they hesitated to share, and much more.

Here’s how you can share some scallops with us— (more…)

It’s time to return to Pittsburgh for the penultimate episode of Eating the Fantastic recorded during the recent Nebula Awards weekend. If you want to experience that weekend as I did, check out my two dinners with Kelly Robson and Matthew Kressel, lunch with Alyx Dellamonica, and the chaotic but hopefully entertaining lightning-round Donut Jamboree.

And then move on to this episode’s guest, Ellen Klages, who won the Nebula Award in 2005 for her novelette, “Basement Magic.” Her novella, “Wakulla Springs” (co-authored with previous guest of the show Andy Duncan), was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards and won the World Fantasy Award in 2014.

She won the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, the Lopez Award for Children’s Literature, and the New Mexico State Book Award for Young Adult Literature for her first novel, The Green Glass Sea. She has served for twenty years on the Motherboard of the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award. Her novella “Passing Strange” was one of the finalists for this year’s Nebula award.

Our venue for this episode was the relatively new Whitfield at Ace Hotel. This was certainly the most picturesque setting for a meal I experienced in Pittsburgh, because the building which housed both hotel and restaurant was a century-old former YMCA.

We discussed why it took 40 years from the time she wrote the first sentence of her Nebula Award-nominated story “Passing Strange” to finish the tale, what a truck filled with zebras taught her about the difference between storytelling and real life, how cosplaying helped give birth to her characters, what she finds so fascinating about creating historical science fiction, why revising is her favorite part of writing, the reason she’s the best auctioneer I’ve seen in my lifetime of con-going, what she teaches students is the worst mistake a writer can make, how her collaboration with Andy Duncan gave birth to an award-winning novella, whether she still feels like “a round peg in genre’s polyhedral hole” as she wrote in the afterword to her first short story collection, and much more.

Here’s how you can taste some of that Toad in a Hole with us— (more…)

Join me for lunch at the World Science Fiction Convention. No, not this year’s San Jose Worldcon, which won’t happen until August. Or even last year’s Worldcon in Helsinki. But the 1993 San Francisco Worldcon!

Here’s how we’re going to do that …

Late last year, I repurposed a Science Forum I’d recorded for Science Fiction Age magazine on March 1, 1994 into Episode 56 of Eating the Fantastic. You got to hear Charles Sheffield and Arlan Andrews, Sr. chatting over lunch at an Italian restaurant about the many ways the world might end. But for this episode, we’ll be going even further back into the past.

On September 1, 1993, I shared lunch during the San Francisco Worldcon with not only Andrews and Sheffield, but Gregory Benford and Geoffrey Landis as well. I thought it would be fun to bring together working scientists to have them discuss over a meal everything wrong (and a few things which might be right) with how their profession is portrayed in science fiction.

I no longer have any idea which convention hotel restaurant we gathered in for our recording session, but we were definitely eating—as you’ll be able to hear for yourself when a sizzling platter of something called a “Laredo” is put in front of us and we worry about whether it’s safe to eat without burning ourselves.

An edited transcript of this conversation was published in the January 1994 issue of Science Fiction Age. So who were this quartet of scientist/science fiction writers when we recorded this Science Forum 25 years ago? Here’s how I described them in that issue—

Gregory Benford is a professor of physics working at the University of California at Irvine, who has also written over a dozen SF novels. Arlan Andrew, Sr. is an executive at a national laboratory, who has worked in the White House Science Office in both the Bush and Clinton administrations. A longtime SF reader, Geoffrey Landis has long looked at the role of the scientist both as an experimentalist and as an SF writer. Charles Sheffield holds a Ph.D in theoretical physics and serves as Chief Scientist for the Earth Satellite Corporation.

And I should add that during my years editing Science Fiction Age magazine from 1992 through 2000, I published short fiction by each of them.

We discussed how Gilligan’s Island gave TV viewers the wrong idea about scientists, the ways in which most science fiction isn’t actually science fiction at all, but rather engineering fiction, what’s wrong with portraying scientists as if they’re any different than non-scientists, why Stephen King’s The Stand gave such a negative picture of science and technology, the dangers of letting governments control science, why real science, like real art, is work, the reason scientists need to be more aggressive about the ways in which they’re portrayed, and more.

Here’s how you can share some of that sizzling “Laredo” with us— (more…)

Let’s go back to Pittsburgh, shall we? Because it’s time for the fourth of six episodes of Eating the Fantastic I recorded during last month’s Nebula Awards weekend, following the lightning-round Donut Jamboree, my dinner with Kelly Robson a mere 48 hours before she picked up a trophy, and a leisurely lunch with A. M. Dellamonica.

This episode’s guest is Matthew Kressel, whose short story “The Last Novelist (or A Dead Lizard in the Yard)” was one of the finalists this year. He was a previous finalist twice before in the same category for “The Sounds of Old Earth” in 2014 and “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye” in 2015. His short stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Analog, Interzone, and many others, as well as in anthologies such as Mad Hatters and March Hares, Cyber World, The People of the Book, and more. His novel, King of Shards, was praised by NPR as being “majestic, resonant, reality-twisting madness.”

He was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award for his work editing the speculative fiction magazine Sybil’s Garage, and is the co-host—along with former Eating the Fantastic guest Ellen Datlow—of the Fantastic Fiction reading series held at the KGB Bar.

Our dinner Friday night that weekend was at Pork & Beans, which has been voted best BBQ in Pittsburgh. 

We discussed the story of his accepted by an editor within an hour and then praised by Joyce Carol Oates, the ways in which famed editor Alice Turner was the catalyst which helped turn him into a writer, why after publishing only short stories for 10 years he eventually published a novel, how comments from his Altered Fluid writing workshop helped make his Nebula-nominated “The Sounds of Old Earth” a better story, why a writing self-help book made him swear off those kinds of self-help books, the secrets to having a happy, heathy writing career, why he’s grown to be OK with reading bad reviews, what he learned from reading slush at Sybil’s Garage, and much more.

Here’s how you can dig into that BBQ with us— (more…)

It’s only 16 days until the start of Readercon, which I’ve been attending since 1987. I love it so much I’ve only missed one.

Readercon has bounced around Massachusetts over the decades, and this year it’s in Quincy for the third time, where it will run from July 12-16.

Here’s the programming on which you’ll be able to find me—

Thursday, July 12, 8:00 p.m., Salon 5
Writers Who Edit, Editors Who Write
Those who edit as a full-time job rarely do much writing on the side, but many full-time writers bolster their incomes through editing. Why does this equation seem to function better in one direction than the other? How do writers who edit avoid the pitfalls experienced by editors who write? What can be done to address an ever-widening taste gap, and the tendency to self-edit into the ground?
with Julia Rios, Mike Allen, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Mimi Mondal, John Edward Lawson

Thursday, July 12, 9:30 p.m., Salon B
Reading
I’ll be reading “The Stranded Time Traveler Embraces the Inevitable,” which will be published later this year in the anthology If This Goes On.

Friday, July 13, 2:00 p.m., Salon C
In Memoriam: Gardner Dozois
Gardner Dozois (1947–2018) was a towering figure in the field. He won 15 Hugo Awards for his editorial work, which included 20 years as editor of Asimov’s and 40 years of editing annual surveys of SF and fantasy as well as other anthologies. Less celebrated, but also excellent, were his short fiction and novels. We were honored to make him a guest of honor at Readercon 22. Join us in celebrating his life and work.
with Henry Wessells, Shawna McCarthy, Sheila Williams, Michael Swanwick, Gregory Feeley

Saturday, July 14, 10:00 a.m., Seven Masts
Kaffeeklatsch
with Victoria Janssen

I hope to see you there!

The most recent list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants was revealed yesterday, and I see that over the years, I’ve managed to get to seven of them—the same seven as last year, and one fewer than from the 2016 list.

You can find my reactions to those seven meals linked below.

1. Osteria Francescana (Modena, Italy)
2. El Celler de Can Roca (Girona, Spain)
3. Mirazur (Menton, France)
4. Eleven Madison Park (New York City)
5. Gaggan (Bangkok)
6. Central (Lima)
7. Maido (Lima)
8. L’Arpège (Paris)
9. Mugaritz (Errenteria, Spain)
10. Asador Etxebarri (Axpe, Spain)
11. Quintonil (Mexico City)
12. Blue Hill at Stone Barns (Pocantico Hills, New York)
13. Pujol (Mexico City)
14. Steirereck (Vienna, Austria)
15. White Rabbit (Moscow)
16. Piazza Duomo (Alba, Italy)
17. Den (Tokyo)
18. Disfrutar (Barcelona, Spain)
19. Geranium (Copenhagen)
20. Attica (Melbourne)
21. Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée (Paris, France)
22. Narisawa (Tokyo, Japan)
23. Le Calandre (Rubano, Italy)
24. Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet (Shanghai, China)
25. Cosme (New York City, USA)
26. Le Bernardin (New York City, USA)
27. Boragó (Santiago, Chile)
28. Odette (Singapore)
29. Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen (Paris, France)
30. D.O.M. (São Paulo, Brazil)
31. Arzak (San Sebastian, Spain)
32. Tickets (Barcelona, Spain)
33. The Clove Club (London, UK)
34. Alinea (Chicago)
35. Maaemo (Oslo, Norway)
36. Reale (Castel Di Sangro, Italy)
37. Restaurant Tim Raue (Berlin, Germany)
38. Lyle’s (London, UK)
39. Astrid y Gastón (Lima)
40. Septime (Paris, France)
41. Nihonryori RyuGin (Tokyo, Japan)
42. The Ledbury (London, UK)
43. Azurmendi (Larrabetzu, Spain)
44. Mikla (Istanbul, Turkey)
45. Dinner by Heston Blumenthal (London)
46. Saison (San Francisco, USA)
47. Schloss Schauenstein (Fürstenau, Switzerland)
48. Hiša Franko (Kobarid, Slovenia)
49. Nahm (Bangkok, Thailand)
50. The Test Kitchen (Cape Town, South Africa)

I’ve also eaten at one of the restaurants from the extended list of the Top 100—The Fat Duck, which came in at #74.

Two other awards were handed out this year for restaurants I’ve visited—Gastón Acurio of Astrid y Gastón was given a Lifetime Achievement Award, and Geranium was given the Art of Hospitality Award.

Alas, my travels over the next year won’t allow me to visit any of the other venues. But someday!