It’s time for Eating the Fantastic to say farewell to Readercon, as I invite you to take a seat at the table for the third and final conversation recorded for you there. You’ve already shared ramen with Mur Lafferty and Indian food with Karen Heuler, and it’s now time to tear into seafood tacos with Richard Butner.

Richard Butner’s short fiction has been published in such venues as Uncanny, The Deadlands, F&SF, Electric Velocipede, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and others. Many of those stories have appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, been shortlisted for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, and nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Those stories have also been collected in his books Horses Blow Up Dog City & Other Stories (2004) and The Adventurists (2022). He runs the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference, a long-running invitation-only workshop for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and related work, which was started by John Kessel, Mark Van Name, and Gregory Frost.

But fiction isn’t his only focus. He’s also written articles and reviews of hardware, software and websites for technology magazines such as IBM Think Research, Wired, PC Magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life, and Windows Sources, has written for and performed with the Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern (where he was a Writer-in-Residence), Aggregate Theatre, Bare Theatre, the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, Urban Garden Performing Arts, CAM/now, and Lost Immersive, and played in several bands, including the Angels of Epistemology, and/or, Etheroid and the Sacred Cows, and the Aqua Mules.

We discussed the early influence of Harlan Ellison, the time he went through the same trapdoor as Harry Houdini, which creative career he decided at age nine he was already too old to pursue, the paragraph from his recent collection I adored the most, the ways in which setting can be a character, why he defines his writerly self as being neither gardener nor architect but explorer, how he’s attracted to writing about the type of  characters Bruce Sterling once described as “criminally unemotional,” what ambiguity truly means and why it matters, how meeting John Kessel changed his life, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for tacos at Burlington’s Border Cafe — (more…)