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 — (more…)