Thursday at LAcon V was my busiest day for chatting and chewing. First came an early morning breakfast with Robert Silverberg — which alas, was not recorded for Eating the Fantastic — followed by lunch with last episode’s guest Martha Wells, and ending in a dinner with this episode’s guest Thomas Ha, who three nights later won a Hugo Award.

That second Hugo Awards ballot nomination — as well as his fourth appearance on the Nebula Awards ballot earlier in the year — were both for his short story “In My Country.”

That story also resulted in one of his three World Fantasy Awards nominations, including one for “Uncertain Sons,” which won a Nebula Award earlier this year, and for his short story collection, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories. Ha ended up winning a World Fantasy Award for that collection just last weekend. He’s also won two Locus Awards, in addition to being nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, a British SF Association Award, an Ignyte Award, a Philip K. Dick Award, and a Shirley Jackson Award. 

His fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Weird Horror, and more. His work has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror.

We discussed why he’s pro-ambiguity in his fiction (and how he decides when to use that tool), why there should never be only a single way to tell a story, how reading the fiction of Gene Wolfe changed his writing, why writers should resist the urge to educate those they feel misread their stories, how he knew he’d achieved critical mass with his short fiction and it was collection time, why a novel might not be in his future, the reason I thought his collection’s foreword should have been an afterword (and what he thought about my logic), his secret formula for determining whether editorial suggestions make sense, the way where we read a story affects how we read it, the story of his which terrified me the most (and whether he could guess which one that was), plus much more.

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