Carolyn Ives Gilman was one of my earliest guests of the podcast, appearing all the way back on Episode 5. Nine years and two days later, the night she was taking part in the latest Charm City Spec, we decided it was time to chat and chew for you again.

Gilman’s books include her first novel Halfway Human, which has been called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF;” Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; and Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution. Some of her short fiction can be found in Aliens of the Heart and Candle in a Bottle, both from Aqueduct Press, and in Arkfall and The Ice Owl, from Arc Manor.

Her short fiction has also appeared in Analog, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others.  She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo twice. Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant.  She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.

We discussed the way her ideas aren’t small enough to squeeze into short stories, how she shelved a novel she’d written because she felt her imagination at its wildest wasn’t ridiculous enough to match reality, whether our personal archives will be trashed or treasured, the reason she doesn’t feel she can teach writing, why authors need to respect what the story wants, why she’s terrible at reacting to writing prompts and how she does it anyway, how she generally starts a story not with character or plot but with setting, the ethics and morality of zoos and museums, how she manages to makes the impossible seem possible, our shared inability to predict which stories editors will want, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Tamber’s restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland — (more…)

A new Eating the Fantastic is now live! Episode 5 was recorded with Carolyn Ives Gilman at Range in Friendship Heights, Maryland.

Carolyn is a Nebula, Hugo, and Tiptree-award nominated author whose first novel, Halfway Human, was called “one of the most compelling explorations of gender and power in recent SF.”

We discussed what’s kept her coming back to her Twenty Planets universe for a quarter of a century, how her first science fiction convention was “total sensory overload,” what it was like working with David Hartwell as an editor, why she’s not visible on social media, and more.

Here’s how you can listen in— (more…)

Whenever I attend a convention, there’s always the official con, and then the con away from the con, which typically involves at least one great meal. And that’s the way it was with Capclave, which was just held in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I took part in four panels—three to which I’d previously been assigned plus one I was added to at the last minute to replace a panelist who couldn’t make it.

I enjoyed sharing what wisdom I could on such panels as “Building Your Audience”—which ended with me invalidating all the advice I’d given during the previous hour when I quoted William Goldman’s maxim that “Nobody knows anything”—and “Food In Fiction”—during which I explained why Rene Redzepi uses ants in his New Nordic cuisine.

While I found all of that to be fun—you know me, put a microphone in front of me and I won’t shut up—the most important panel was probably the “Tiptree Retrospective,” which was captured above in a photo taken by Barbara Krasnoff. That’s Jim Freund, Julia Rios, Sarah Pinsker, me, and David Hartwell (who’d been Alice Sheldon’s editor and had actually visited her at home) reminiscing about that great writer in this, the year in which she would have turned 100. (more…)