I’d planned to break bread with award-winning writer A.C. Wise during Balticon earlier this year, and I refuse to let the conversation which would have occurred over that meal be stolen from me merely because COVID-19 prevented the convention from being held in meatspace. So we both got to baking, and now you can eavesdrop as we nibble — she on chocolate zucchini bread and me on cherry pecan bread — and pretend we had the year we wanted instead of the year we got.

Wise is a two-time finalist for the Nebula Award, two-time finalist for the Sunburst Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Plus she’s won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Tor.com, Shimmer, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies. Her work can also be found in two collections, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again and The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, both published with Lethe Press. Her debut novel, Wendy, Darling, will be out from Titan Books in June 2021, and a new short story collection, The Ghost Sequences, will be published by Undertow Books next August.

We discussed how her first professionally published fiction ended up printed on a coffee can, the 24-hour challenge which led to the creation of her Lambda Award-nominated collection, which comic book character obsesses her the most, how individual stories can act as commentary on all stories, why she enjoys wielding the power of ambiguity, how workshopping with other writers can help make stories better, what The Queen’s Gambit can teach us about dealing with reader expectations, the unexpected way a flash fiction piece turned into her first novel, and much more.

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Here at Eating the Fantastic, I’m continuing to act as if the year we’re living in isn’t really happening, and we instead got the 2020 we deserved. Which means it’s time to return for a third meal which should have happened during StokerCon, following up on my remote meals with Priya Sharma and Robert Shearman.

My guest this time around for a conversation which couldn’t happen earlier this year but which we’re going to pretend did, thanks to the urging of my Patreon supporters, is Munich-based writer Steve Toase.

Steve’s fiction has appeared in Aurealis, Not One Of Us, Nox Pareidolia, Three Lobed Burning Eye, Shimmer, Lackington’s, and other magazines and anthologies. His stories have been reprinted multiple times in volumes of The Best Horror Of The Year. He was also the lead writer on a project called Haunt, about Harrogate’s haunting presence in the lives of people experiencing homelessness there. He writes regularly for Fortean Times and Folklore Thursday. His first short story collection, To Drown In Dark Water, will be released by Undertow Publications in January.

We discussed how his COVID-19 lifestyle has been both an inspiration for and a distraction from his writing, the way reading his stories at open mic nights helped him hone his craft, the importance of dread in horror, how his background in landscape archeology helps make his fiction more visceral, the challenge of scripting a planetarium show for the visually impaired, what gave birth to his fascination with Forteana, his advice for those who’d like to improve their flash fiction, the short story sale which told him he’d made it, our shared love of the great Italo Calvino, which of his creations brings him the greatest pride, the advice he wishes he could give his younger self about writing, and much more.

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2020 will forever be remembered by me as the first year — and the only year, I hope — during which I wasn’t able to attend an in-person, face-to-face convention. But here at Eating the Fantastic, I’m doing my best to turn those might have beens into realities.

And so you’ve already had the chance to eavesdrop on meals which were meant to have taken place in Wellington, New Zealand during Worldcon — with Lee Murray, Stephen Dedman, and Farah Mendlesohn — and last episode, we went to Scarborough together for a StokerCon meal with Priya Sharma. Now it’s time to return to StokerCon to chat and chew with the always entertaining Robert Shearman.

Robert Shearman has won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and multiple British Fantasy Awards for his fiction, some of which has been gathered in such collections as Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical (2009), Remember Why You Fear Me (2012), They Do the Same Things Different There (2014), and earlier this year, a massive three-volume collection We All Hear Stories in the Dark. His writings for television, radio, and the stage have won him the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award, the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Theatre Ingenuity. He also wrote the Hugo Award-nominated Doctor Who episode “Dalek” at the request of producer Russell T. Davies.

We discussed the reason we’re lucky we each survived to adulthood, how he almost talked his way out of selling his first short story, the way he starts every story thinking it’s funny even as things turn horrific, why some readers find his new collection offensive and others uplifting, how he’s following up that three-volume, 2,000-page, 650,000-word, 101-story collection, the way his brush with COVID-19 has affected his writing, and much more.

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April’s StokerCon was cancelled — but not here at Eating the Fantastic. That’s because I’m on a mission to reclaim all of 2020’s convention conversations lost to COVID-19. I’ve already shared with you three “might have been” chats which would have taken place in New Zealand during Worldcon — with Lee Murray, Stephen Dedman, and Farah Mendlesohn — and now it’s time to head to Scarborough for lunch — or is it dinner? — with Priya Sharma.

Priya Sharma has published fiction in Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark, and other venues. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. “Ormeshadow,” her first novella, won a Shirley Jackson Award. All the Fabulous Beasts, a collection of some of her work, won both the Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award. She’s also a Grand Judge for the Aeon Award, an annual writing competition run by Albedo One, Ireland’s magazine of the Fantastic.

We discussed the best decision she made about her debut short story collection All the Fabulous Beasts, how the cover to that book conveys a different message in our COVID-19 world, why we each destroyed much of our early writing, a surprising revelation about the changed ending to one of her stories, who told her as a child “your soul is cracked,” the two of us being both longhand writers and defenders of ambiguity, what it’s like writing (and not writing) for theme anthologies, the most difficult story for her to write, how the pandemic has affected our writing, and much more.

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After 189 guests and more than 224 hours of ear candy, Eating the Fantastic makes history — by offering you an episode with the greatest discrepancy between the quality of the guest and the quality of the food being eaten.

I’ve known that guest, Danny Fingeroth, for more than 40 years. A Marvelous Life: The Amazing Story of Stan Lee, his biography of “The Man,” has just been released in paperback. That’s but the latest of his many accomplishments since he started in comics back in the ’70s as an assistant at Marvel to previous guest Larry Lieber.

Danny went on to become group editor for all the Spider-Man titles, and writer of the Deadly Foes of Spider-Man and Lethal Foes of Spider-Man mini-series, plus long runs on Dazzler and Darkhawk. His other books in addition to that Stan Lee bio include Superman On The Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Society and Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero.

As for dinner … our multi-course meal was made up of nothing but Marvel-branded food — which clearly should be ingested for their novelty value only — about which you’ll hear us kibitz during our conversation.

We discussed his start (like mine) in the Marvel British reprint department, what was wrong with the early letters he wrote to comics as a kid, his admittedly over-generalized theory that there were only two kinds of people on staff at Marvel, our differing reactions to the same first comic book convention in 1970, our somewhat similar regrets about the old-timers we worked beside during our early days in comics, the reason working in comics was wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time, why he wanted to be not only Stan Lee, but both Stan and Jack Kirby, how he was able to interview “The Man” and get him to say things he’d never said before, why comics was the perfect medium for Stan Lee, and much more.

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This episode, six months into the COVID-19 lockdown, is the first since my chat with Michael Dirda I was able to record the way these episodes are meant to be recorded — seated face to face with a guest over a table of delicious food. In this time when both conventions and restaurant dining are impossible, I’ve been hosting remote meals with guests whose face-to-face encounters “might have been,” most recently the previous three episodes — with Lee Murray, Stephen Dedman, and Farah Mendlesohn — which would have been recorded in the flesh in New Zealand if this year’s World Science Fiction Convention hadn’t gone virtual.

This episode, I was able to totally fulfill the mandate of this podcast, and lose myself in a meal as I sat across a table face to face with a creator. That’s because I’ve known this guest for 46 years plus a few months — and have been in constant conversation with her for almost all of that time. She’s been a part of comics and science fiction fandom several years longer than I have, and worked in comics longer than I did, too. When I started at Marvel Comics on June 24, 1974, she’d ready been there for a couple of months. She has many fascinating things to say about her time in comics — and her decades working in the romance field as well.

I’m of course talking about my wife — Irene Vartanoff — or as she was dubbed by Stan Lee — “Impish” Irene Vartanoff. Her novel Hollywood Superheroine — the final book in her comics-inspired Temporary Superheroine trilogy — was recently published, so this is the perfect time to have a chat about it all.

We discussed how she’d never have gotten into comics if not for her father’s cigar habit, what made a comic book reader become a comic book fan become a comic book professional, the “heartbreaking” advice given to her by Julie Schwartz during her teen visit to DC Comics, why her reputation as a famed letterhack meant she didn’t face the same sexism as other women in comics, what it was like working for Roy Thomas at Marvel and Paul Levitz at DC (and why she respected them both), how critiquing romance manuscripts for 25 years was like being at Marvel all over again, the secret origins of her Temporary Superheroine character, how politics changed Hollywood Superheroine, the final novel in her trilogy, why pantsing works better for her than plotting, the reason she decided to go the indie publishing route, and much more.

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Continuing to not let COVID-19 fracture the community I’ve been a part of for the past 50 years, I invite you to join me for another nibble which would have taken place during CoNZealand had the pandemic not forced the 78th World Science Fiction convention to go virtual.

I’d previously made plans to chat and chew with three guests on the ground in Wellington, but since that proved impossible, I decided to go virtual, too, urged on by my Patreon supporters. And so, during my previous two episodes, you were able to eavesdrop as I dined with Lee Murray in New Zealand and Stephen Dedman in Australia. This time around, we’re off to Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England for tea and scones with Farah Mendlesohn.

Farah was a Hugo Award finalist this year in the category of Best Related Work for her book The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, and had previously been nominated in that category for The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction, and On Joanna Russ. She won a Hugo (with Edward James) in 2005 for The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, as well as a World Fantasy Award in 2017 for Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, which she wrote with Michael M. Levy.

She’s also edited anthologies, including Glorifying Terrorism, Manufacturing Contempt: An Anthology of Original Science Fiction, which she created to protest laws introduced by the British Government she saw as restricting free speech. She was the chair of the Science Fiction Foundation from 2004-2007, served as President of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts from 2008-2011, and is currently an Associate Fellow of The Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy.

We discussed the reasons Robert A. Heinlein resonated with her, how her early and current readings of Heinlein differ, why the science fiction of the ’30s was far more politically radical than that of the ’40s and ’50s, her deliberately controversial comment about Ursula K. Le Guin, the circumstances under which she’s more interested in the typical rather than the groundbreaking, that period during the ’20s when everyone was fascinated by glands, the one Heinlein book she wishes we’d go all back and reread, our joint distaste for fan policing, and much more.

Here’s how you can eavesdrop on our conversation — (more…)

In a world without COVID-19, I’d be recovering from jet lag right about now after my trip to Wellington to attend CoNZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction convention. But that’s not what’s happening, because the con went virtual, as so many cons have this year, which meant I attended at home in my pajamas.

Which also meant there were no restaurant outings during that con with creators of the fantastic from which I could bring back conversations to share with you. But thanks to a push from some of my Patreon supporters, I decided — the chats I’d planned shouldn’t be lost. And so although my guests and I couldn’t be seated at the same table sharing the same food and breathing the same air, Eating the Fantastic goes on, even if that means sharing meals across thousands of miles and a dozen or more time zones.

Last episode, I had a long-distance meal with the award-winning New Zealand writer and editor Lee Murray, my dinner and her lunch the following day — and this episode I have breakfast while Australian writer Stephen Dedman has dinner 12 hours in my future.

Stephen has published more than 100 short stories, some of which I was privileged to publish back when I was editing Science Fiction Age magazine. You can find many of those stories in his collections The Lady of Situations (1999) and Never Seen by Waking Eyes (2005). His novels, which include The Art of Arrow Cutting (1997), Foreign Bodies (1999), Shadows Bite (2001), and others, have been Bram Stoker, Aurealis, William L. Crawford, and Ditmar Award nominees. He’s also written role-playing games, stageplays, erotica, and westerns. And he at one time worked as a “used dinosaur parts salesman,” a job which had me extremely curious — and as you listen to us chat and chew, you’ll find out all about it.

We discussed how the Apollo 11 moon landing introduced him to science fiction, what his father told him which changed his plan to become a cartoonist, the huge difference the Internet made in the lives of Australian writers, his creative trick for getting his first poem published, what acting taught him about being funny in the midst of tragedy, his former job as a used dinosaur parts salesman, the way page one tells him whether he’s got a short story or novel idea, how Harlan Ellison became the first American editor to buy one of his stories, and much more.

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I should be on my way to Wellington, New Zealand right now to attend CoNZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction convention, during which I’d planned to dine with friends and then share our conversations with you. But alas, that’s not happening, and I’m sure I don’t need to explain why.

But at the urgings of some of my Patreon supporters, I’ve decided to break bread anyway with some of the creators I’d intended to record with had I made it there, only with 16 hours and thousands of miles separating us. So last night, I had dinner with writer Lee Murray, while she had lunch the following day.

Lee is a three-time Bram Stoker Awards finalist, and is also New Zealand’s most awarded writer and editor of fantastic fiction, having won two Australian Shadows and a dozen Sir Julius Vogel Awards. Her novels include The Battle of the Birds (2011), Dawn of the Zombie Apocalypse (2019), as well as Into the Mist (2016), Into the Sounds (2018), Into the Ashes (2019), and others.   She’s edited fourteen anthologies, including Baby Teeth: Bite-Sized Tales of Terror (2013), Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror (2018), and others.  Her first collection, Grotesque: Monster Stories, will be published July 24.

We discussed how she crafted her first short story collection, the importance of mentoring our next generation of genre writers, why we’re unlikely to ever go spelunking together, whether she prefers her zombies fast or slow, the unique awards club of which we’re both members, the way her use of New Zealand culture might be perceived differently by readers in and out of her country, the difficulties some seem to have with stories written in the present tense, the thrill of being the first New Zealander to appear in Weird Tales magazine, how the experiences of reading aloud The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings differ, and much more.

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It’s been more than three months since I met with Michael Dirda to record the last — though it would be more accurate to instead call it the most recent — face-to-face episode of Eating the Fantastic. Since then, I also shared two episodes recorded remotely — with Sarah Pinsker and Justina Ireland — each with its own special reason for allowing me to step beyond this podcast’s meatspace culinary mandate.

But because it still seems unsafe out there for a guest to meet with me within the walls of the restaurant, you and I are now about to sequester together, just as we did four episodes ago, when we sheltered in place, and two episodes back, when we practiced social distancing.

Thirty questions remained from my original call to listeners and previous guests of the show, and this time I managed to get through all of them. I did my best to give intelligent responses to Annalee Flower Horne, Daryl Gregory, Michael Dirda, Patrick Freivald, Kaaron Warren, Paul Kirchner, Sam J. Miller, Erik T. Johnson, Ursula Marcum, Nalo Hopkinson, Marv Wolfman, Glenn Ricci, Elisabeth Massie, Scott H. Andrews, Sunny Moraine, Chen Quifan, Brian Keene, Vanessa Rose Phin, Phillip Beadham, Jack Dann, and Xia Jia.

I answered questions about whether my early days in fandom and early writing success helped my career, which anthology I’d like to edit if given the chance, what different choices I wish I’d made over my lifetime, what I predict for the future of food, how the pandemic has affected my writing, if anything I’ve written has ever scared me, whether writer’s block is a reality or a myth, which single comic book I’d want to own if I could only have one, how often I’m surprised by something a guest says, the life lessons I learned from Harlan Ellison, and much more.

Here’s how you can sequester with me — (more…)