The past two years of Eating the Fantastic were quite different due to COVID, and not only because of the conventions and other events which were cancelled, allowing only six in-person episodes out of 22 in 2020, and 12 of 27 in 2022. But also lost were the weekend trips I’d expected to make to New York and other cities, which kept me from many of the guests I’d hoped to host for you.

And since it doesn’t look as if I’ll make it to Manhattan any time soon, I decided I’d waited long enough for a face-to-face get-together Paul Witcover. To prevent COVID from stealing the conversation we should have had long ago, he picked up a pulled pork sandwich from New York’s Hometown Bar-B-Que, I grabbed a three-meat platter from Bonnie Blue Southern Market & Bakery in Winchester, Virginia, and even though there were hundreds of miles between us, we shared an entertaining lunch.

Paul Witcover‘s first novel, Waking Beauty (1997) was short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. He’s also written five other novels: Tumbling After (2005), Dracula: Asylum (2006), The Emperor of All Things (2013) and its sequel, The Watchman of Eternity (2015), plus most recently, Lincolnstein, just out from PS Publishing.

His 2004 novella “Left of the Dial” was nominated for a Nebula Award, and his 2009 novella “Everland” was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in Twilight Zone magazine, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Night Cry, and other venues. A collection of his short fiction, Everland and Other Stories, appeared from PS Publishing in 2009, and was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. He’s been a frequent reviewer for Realms of Fantasy, Locus, New York Review of Science Fiction, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction at UCLA Extension and at Southern New Hampshire University, where he is the Dean of the Online MFA program.

We discussed the reason the pandemic resulted in some of the best years of his freelance career, the way he thrives as a writer when dealing with the boundaries of historical fiction, why his new novel Lincolnstein is “exactly what you think it is,” how he writes in yesterday’s vernacular without perpetuating yesterday’s stereotypes, what can and can’t be taught about writing, the reasons he felt lucky to have attended Clarion with Lucius Shepard, the effect reading slush at Asimov’s and Twilight Zone magazines had on his own fiction, what Algis Budrys told him that hit him like a brick, and much more.

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Library of Congress curator Sara Duke and I were supposed to have lunch two years ago, way back in March of 2020, but then … something happened. I suspect you can guess what that something was. We finally managed to break bread — or rather, share Pad See Ew — last week at D.C.’s Young Chow Chinese restaurant.

Sara Duke has been at the Library of Congress for more than 30 years, the past 23 as the curator of Popular and Applied Graphic Art in the Prints and Photographs Division. She’s in charge of cartoons, documentary drawings, and ephemera. Starting with Blondie Gets Married in 2000, she’s been responsible for curating many exhibits relating to popular culture, including Comic Art: 120 Years of Panels and Pages, and most recently, Geppi’s Gems.

We discussed the first piece of artwork she longed to get her hands on after a 13-month pandemic absence, our joint loathing of slabbed comics, the misconceptions many people have about the Library of Congress, the things most people no longer remember about Blondie, her comic book exhibit cancelled by COVID, the serendipitous way a PhD in 17th century Irish history led to her becoming a curator, her early (and continuing) love of MAD magazine, and much more.

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Well, we had a good run, didn’t we? Eight consecutive in-person conversations in a row had me thinking the era of pandemic-induced remote episodes was over, and I was looking forward to continuing to break bread face-to-face with guests during February’s Boskone. But it was not to be, for reasons you’ll hear explained once you check out the remote meal I ended up sharing with Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay is the author of the award-winning novels novels A Head Full of Ghosts (2015), which won the Bram Stoker Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock (2016), which won the British Fantasy Award, and The Cabin at the End of the World (2018), which won the Bram Stoker Award and Locus Award. His most recent novel is Survivor Song, published in 2020, with The Pallbearer’s Club due out later this year. He’s also the author of the novels The Little Sleep, No Sleep till Wonderland, Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, and writing as P. T,. Jones along with Stephen Graham Jones, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly. His short story collection Growing Things and Other Stories was published in 2019. He is the co-editor of four anthologies including Creatures: Thirty Years of Monster Stories (with John Langan), and is on the board of directors and is one of the jurors for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

We discussed his legendary hatred of pickles, what it was like writing a pandemic novel before a pandemic only to see it published in the middle of one, if reviewers would have reacted differently to his zombies had Survivor Song been published any other year, his feelings about the description of him as a postmodernist, our shared love of ambiguity in fiction, whether horror having a moment means horror will also have an end, the one passage in his most recent novel which caused an argument with his editor, what’s up with the movie adaptations of his books, and much more.

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I wish DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, could have gone on forever, but alas, it must end, even here at Eating the Fantastic. And so, after the chatting and chewing I’ve done with José Pablo Iriarte, Fonda Lee, Usman T. Malik, and Daryl Gregory, we arrive at the D.C. Worldcon’s final culinary conversation.

My guest for brunch at the Unconventional Diner — about which Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema wrote — when he placed the restaurant at #4 on his Fall dining guide last year — “No restaurant fed me more often, or better, throughout the pandemic than French chef David Deshaies’s whimsical tribute to American comfort food.” — was two-time Hugo Award finalist Natalie Luhrs.

Luhrs was first nominated in 2017 for Best Fan Writer, and then again last year in the Best Related Work category for her essay “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition).” She’s the former science fiction and fantasy reviewer for Romantic Times Book Reviews and was briefly an acquisitions editor for Masque Books, the digital imprint of Prime. Though she dabbles in writing speculative fiction and poetry, she is mostly known for her non-fiction — which earned her those nominations — and can be found at her personal blog, Pretty Terrible, the intersectional geek blog, The Bias, which she co-founded with previous guest of this podcast Annalee Flower Horne, and of course, on Twitter, as @eilatanReads.

We discussed why I had a more optimistic outlook on her chances of winning last year than she did, the emotions which inspired her most recently nominated work and the doxxing that resulted from her offering up that opinion, her love for Dune even as she recognizes the classic novel’s problematic parts, what she once said about the Lord Peter Wimsey continuations which caused a backlash, the ways romance and science fiction conventions differ, where she chooses to expend her spoons when controversies arise, the importance of making our shared fannish community a welcoming space for all, recent science fiction novels which blew her mind, and much more.

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Out in the real world, DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, is two months behind us in the rearview mirror … but here at Eating the Fantastic, it goes on. And now that you’ve eavesdropped as I’ve chatted and chewed with José Pablo Iriarte, Fonda Lee, and Usman T. Malik, it’s time for you to join Daryl Gregory and me as we have lunch at Dolan Uyghur restaurant.

Daryl Gregory’s first novel, Pandemonium (2008), won the Crawford Award and was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. His novella We Are All Completely Fine (2014) won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award. His short story collection Unpossible and Other Stories was named one of the best books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly. His novel Spoonbenders (2017) was a Top 20 Amazon Editor’s Choice, an Audible.com’s editors choice for the year, and an NPR best book of the year. His most recent novel is Revelator, which was published last August. His comics work includes Planet of the Apes, The Green Hornet, Dracula, and the graphic novel The Secret Battles of Genghis Khan.

If you’d like a tiny taste of Daryl before taking a seat at the table for our full meal, check out what he had to say while eating a raspberry coffee cake donut during the 2018 Nebula Awards weekend.

We discussed how he celebrated the two books he published during the pandemic, what caused him to say about his latest novel, “I like to split the difference to keep everyone as unsatisfied as possible,” the narrative technique which finally unlocked the writing of that book (and why it made Revelator more difficult to complete), how our mothers responded to our writing, the way marketing affects the reading protocols of our stories, how listening to Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm argue about one of his stories freed him as a writer, the promise a murder mystery makes to a reader, his “Mom Rule” for Easter eggs, the way he tortured a comic book artist with an outrageous panel description, how to play fair when writing a science fiction mystery where anything can happen, what Samuel R. Delany told him which helped him make his first sale to F&SF, how he doesn’t understand why everybody doesn’t want to be writers, the way his writing gets better during the times he isn’t writing, Gardner Dozois’ “ladder of sadness,” and much more.

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After pizza with José Pablo Iriarte and Eggs Benedict with Fonda Lee, Eating the Fantastic’s culinary conversations at DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention continue with an excursion for Thai food — and a tasty chat courtesy of Usman T. Malik.

Usman T. Malik won the British Fantasy Award for his novella The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, which was also nominated for both the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards. His story “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family” won the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction. His stories have been published in such magazines as Strange Horizons, Black Static, Nightmare, and Tor.com, as well as anthologies such as Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and others. His collection Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan, was published in 2021.

We discussed why the first pandemic year was his most prolific period ever as a writer, how the Clarion Workshop helped him decide what kind of writer he wanted to be, our shared concerns over revising our early stories, the way his medical training gives him an intriguing advantage as a writer, how every love story is a ghost story and every ghost story is a love story, what it was like running Pakistan’s first science fiction writing workshop, why he prefers Stephen King to Dean Koontz (and what that taught hm about his own writing), the cautionary tale told to him by Samuel R. Delany, how writers teach readers the way they should be read, and much more.

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The Omicron surge is making me fear for my participation in future conventions, but that doesn’t erase the fun I had in D.C. last month during DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention. I recorded five episodes of the podcast that weekend, the first of which was last episode’s pizza dinner with José Pablo Iriarte. This time around I invite you to join me for breakfast with the award-wining writer Fonda Lee.

Fonda Lee won both a World Fantasy Award and an Aurora Award for her novel Jade City, which was also nominated for Nebula, Seiun, and Sunburst Awards. That first installment of her Green Bone Saga, an epic urban fantasy, was followed by Jade War, which was nominated for both the Dragon and Aurora Awards. Jade Legacy, the third book in her series, was released in November of 2021. Her young adult novels Zeroboxer and Exo were both Andre Norton Award finalists. She holds black belts in karate and kung fu, which probably came in handy when it was time for her to write Shang-Chi for Marvel Comics.

Because Fonda is a fan of Eggs Benedict, we headed to the Lafayette restaurant in the Hay Adams Hotel, where I’d been informed by Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post we could find an excellent incarnation of that dish.

We discussed what it was like finishing the final book in her Green Bone Saga trilogy during the pandemic, her secret for keeping track of near 2,000 pages of characters and plot points, why every book project is terrifying in its own way, how much of the ending she knew at the beginning (and our opposing views on whether knowing the ending helps or hurts the creative process), the warring wolves inside her as she writes the most emotionally difficult scenes, why she starts to worry if her writing is going too smoothly, the framing device that became far more than a framing device, why her natural length for processing ideas is the novel rather than the short story, and much more.

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Welcome to the first of five Eating the Fantastic episodes recorded during DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, which ended just a few days ago as this episode goes live. That recent event was quite a nostalgia fest for me, because the first time I attended a Worldcon was in 1974, the last time one was in held in D.C. I was only a teenager in that long ago year, but even then, I already knew — getting together with good friends over good food to yammer with them about science fiction was as much fun as anything offered by the official convention programming.

My dinner companion the first night of the D.C. Worldcon was José Pablo Iriarte, a Cuban American author of science fiction, fantasy, and children’s fiction. Their novelette, “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births,” was a finalist for the Nebula Award and was long-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award. Their short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, and many other venues, stories which have then been spotlighted on best-of lists assembled by Tangent Online, iO9, and others.

When Jose told me one of his favorite foods was pizza, I knew I had to feed them D.C.’s best, leading me to 2Amys, which Thrillist says prepares “near-perfect, delicate pies with bubbly crusts, fresh mozzarella, and fragrant basil. The Margherita is the baseline against which all Neapolitan pies in DC are judged.”

We discussed their go-to karaoke song, why being a math teacher makes it even harder to write about math, what they learned from Speaker for the Dead, how their feelings about Orson Scott Card help them empathize with those struggling over J.K. Rowling today, why they trunked their favorite story until a friend convinced them to send it out, their method for writing successful flash fiction, why they had no problem keeping their Nebula nomination a secret, how to create a good elevator pitch, and much more.

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This episode’s guest, Bob Budiansky, is a old Marvel Bullpen pal — but our relationship goes back much further than that. We met when we both attended the State University of New York at Buffalo and worked together on the student newspaper The Spectrum. I wrote news and feature stories, while he illustrated many of the articles which appeared in the paper, sometimes as many as three per issue, including, occasionally, mine.

Later, when I was working at mid-’70s Marvel Comics and decided I no longer wanted to edit their line of British reprint books, I got yet another SUNY Buffalo student and newspaper coworker, Jay Boyar, to take my place, and then when he moved on, he recommended Bob. And that serendipity is how his 20-year career at Marvel Comics was born.

Bob’s led a multifaceted comics career as a writer, artist, and editor. He’s written (among other things) The Avengers and all 33 issues of Sleepwalker, a character he co-created, plus most of Marvel’s run of The Transformers, for which he came up with the names of most of the original Transformers, including Megatron. In fact, his contributions to that franchise were so great that in 2010 he was inducted into the Transformers Hall of Fame.

As an artist, not only did he draw Ghost Rider and Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, but more importantly (to me, anyway), a Falcon story I wrote which appeared as a back-up in an issue of Captain America. As an editor, he was at times responsible for the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and Spider-Man.

We had dinner at The Helmand, a Baltimore restaurant which has been serving Afghan cuisine since 1989. I learned about the place from former guest of the podcast Fran Wilde, who introduced it to me during a long-ago Balticon.

We discussed the vast differences between the hoops we each had to jump through to get hired back then, why the Skrulls were responsible for him liking DC better than Marvel as an early comics fan, the serendipitous day he attended a wedding and learned the origin of the Golden Age Green Lantern from its creator, why he stopped reading comics in high school … and how Conan the Barbarian got him started again, which Marvel Bullpen staffer saw his art portfolio and suggested he consider a different career, what it was like to witness the creation of Captain Britain, how got his first regular gig drawing covers for Ghost Rider, his five-year relationship developing 250 Transformers characters for Hasbro, and much more.

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Welcome to the second episode of Eating the Fantastic during which you’ll be able to take a seat at the table for a meal during last month’s incarnation of Rockville, Maryland’s Capclave, following last episode’s lunchtime get-together there with writer Suzanne Palmer. This time around, you’re invited to dinner with science fiction writer Lawrence M. Schoen.

Lawrence M. Schoen was a finalist for the 2007 Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and in the years since has been nominated for the Hugo Award (once), the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award (twice), and the Nebula Award (six times). He’s twice won the Cóyotl award for Best Novel — for two books in his critically acclaimed Barsk series: The Elephants Graveyard (2015) and The Moons of Barsk (2018). He also was the 2016 winner of the Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service to SFWA Award.

His most well-known creations are the space-faring stage hypnotist, the Amazing Conroy, and his alien animal traveling companion, a buffalito named Reggie who can eat anything — which he then converts into oxygen via … flatulence. For more than 10 years, he’s hosted the Eating Authors series, which has shared the most memorable meals of more than 500 writers. In addition to all that, he founded the Klingon Language Institute, plus is a hypnotherapist specializing in authors’ issues.

We discussed how he was able to release 12 books in a difficult year affected by both a pandemic and chemo, the pseudonym he was relieved he never had to use, what caused him to say “you find the answers to the problems of your life by writing a story about it,” the RPG improv which led to the creation of his Barsk universe, what he learned at the Taos Toolbox workshop which caused him to completely rewrite one of his books, the all-important power of the subconscious, how transcription software affected his style, why he doesn’t want people to read the final paragraph of his second Barsk novel, his relationships with the indie side of publishing, the many joys of mentoring, how he uses hypnotism to help other writers, and much more.

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