{"id":37552,"date":"2025-08-08T09:53:48","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T13:53:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/?p=37552"},"modified":"2025-08-08T09:53:48","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T13:53:48","slug":"benjamin-rosenbaum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2025\/08\/08\/benjamin-rosenbaum\/","title":{"rendered":"Rip into a lobster roll with Benjamin Rosenbaum in Episode 260 of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s time to say farewell to this year’s Nebula Awards weekend, following our lunch with Aimee Ogden<\/a> and dinner with Curtis C. Chen<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This episode you’ll be able to eavesdrop on my lunch with Benjamin Rosenbaum<\/a>, who’s been published in\u00a0The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction<\/em>,\u00a0Asimov’s Science Fiction<\/em>,\u00a0Harper’s<\/em>,\u00a0Nature<\/em>, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern<\/em>, and many other venues, and as a result has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, BSFA, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. He’s the author of the short story collection\u00a0The Ant King and Other Stories<\/em>, and the Ennie-nominated Jewish historical fantasy tabletop roleplaying game\u00a0Dream Apart<\/em>. <\/p>\n

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His most recent novel is The Unraveling<\/em> (2021), which first appeared in Germany three years earlier. The Ghost and the Golem<\/em>, his 480,000-word Jewish historical fantasy interactive novel set amidst the pogroms of 1881, was a Nebula Award nominee in the category of Game Writing that weekend, so as you listen, you can think of Benjamin as Schr\u00f6dinger’s nominee, existing in a state of many possibilities at once. He is also the co-host of the podcast\u00a0Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We discussed the perhaps true\/perhaps whimsical reason he ended up in the science fiction field rather than literary publishing, why the story he found the most difficult to sell became his most-read work, how he gamified the submission\/rejection process to get into Clarion, the way all stories set in the future are being read in translation, the reason he couldn’t write for a while after his first Nebula nomination, the moral and aesthetic reasons the story of Ghost and the Golem<\/em> ended up as a game rather than a novel, why he believes “I am very much a child of Chip Delany,” the fascinating differences between the German and English versions of his novel The Reckoning<\/em>, the intricacies of turning games into novels and novels into movies, and much more.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s how you can join us for seafood at Earl’s Premier<\/a> — <\/p>\n

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts<\/a> — or wherever<\/a> you choose to consume your podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 259 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

2) Listen via the RSS feed of http:\/\/eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com\/rss<\/a> on the device of your choice.<\/p>\n

3) Or simply use the embed below.<\/p>\n