It’s time to say farewell to Readercon with one final meal there following last episode’s lunch with Jeffrey Ford — so get ready to take a seat at the table with the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer John Chu.

John’s a microprocessor architect by day, and a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Apex, and at Tor.com, plus in anthologies such as The Mythic Dream, Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, New Suns 2: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, and others. His translations have been published or are forthcoming at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF, and other venues.

He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte Awards, won the Best Short Story Hugo for “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere,” plus the Nebula, Ignyte, and Locus Awards for “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You.” In the days before our lunch, he surprised us all with the announcement he’d sold his first novel — and you’ll hear my own surprise during our conversation.

We discussed the way he gamified the submission process when he started out, how the pandemic made him feel as if he was in his own little spaceship, when he learned he couldn’t write novels and short stories at the same time, how food has become a lens through which he could explore a variety of issues in his fiction, the rejection letter he rereads whenever he wants to cheer himself up, how writing stories at their correct lengths was one of the most difficult lessons he had to learn as a writer, what it was about his 2015 short story “Hold-Time Violations” that had him feeling it was worthy of exploring as a novel, how he was changed by winning a Hugo Award with his third published story, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Pho Pasteur Vietnamese restaurant — (more…)