The Coode Street Podcast

For the 2023 instalment of the Very Coode Street Gift Guide, we invited some old friends to share their recommendations of books read in 2023:  Alix E. Harrow (whose very worthy Starling House was a favorite, officially excluded from discussion because of her participation in the episode), award-winning Locus reviewer Ian Mond, and distinguished novelist James Bradley, whose nonfiction Deep Water: The World in the Ocean will be out next year.   The books mentioned during the podcast are listed below.   James Bradley recommended: The Deluge, Stephen Markley Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link Translation State, Ann Leckie Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh Alix E. Harrow recommended: Menewood, Nicola Griffith The Last Tale of the Flower Bride, Roshani Chokshi He Who Drowned the World, Shelley Parker-Chan The Magician's Daughter, H.G. Parry Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett Ian Mond recommended: Conquest, Nina Allan Terrace Stories, Hilary Leichter In Ascension, Martin MacInnes Him, Geoff Ryman I am Homeless if this Is Not My Home, Lorrie Moore Gary recommended: Mr. Breakfast, Jonathan Carroll The Essential Peter S. Beagle (2 vols.), Peter S. Beagle Airside, Christopher Priest Lost Places,Sarah Pinsker (and also Monstrous Alterations, Christopher Barzak; Jewel Box, E. Lily Yu; & The Privilege of a Happy Ending, Kij Johnson) Jonathan recommended: The Sinister Booksellers of Bath, Garth Nix Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill Hopeland, Ian McDonald As always, our thanks to Alix, James, and Ian for making time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the podcast and that the guide is of some help at this time of the year.

The end of the year may be fast approaching, but this episode isn’t quite our usual year-in-review discussion (which will come up later), or our books-we’re-looking-forward-to episode. Instead, we spend some time musing about books we maybe should be looking forward to, if we only knew about them. This raises the question of forthcoming novels that contain substantial fantasy or speculative elements, but that are marketed almost entirely as general or “literary” fiction. The examples Gary cites are The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard and Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice. (Of course, some of our favorites like Kelly Link also get this “mainstream” treatment, as with The Book of Love.) This is turn raises the question of how we find out about new novels from the margins of the field, how we choose what we read when discovering an exciting new writer may mean forgoing a new novel by a favorite, and how to find a balance.

With plans for are promised chat with Elizabeth Hand and Alix E. Harrow on temporary hold, Jonathan and Gary share some pleasant memories of the World Fantasy Convention, muse about whether the nature of conventions has changed in the wake of the pandemic, and speculate about next year’s events in Glasgow, Niagara Falls, and elsewhere. They then touch upon some books they're looking forward to in 2024, including novels by Kelly Link, Nisi Shawl, Peter S. Beagle, and Paolo Bacigalupi, and some titles they’d recommend from 2023, including novels by Ian McDonald, Nina Allan, Geoff Ryman, Christopher Priest, Francis Spufford, Wole Talabi, and Nicola Griffith, as well as a few story collections, anthologies, and nonfiction books. By the end, it almost all comes into some sort of focus.

The 2023 World Fantasy Convention was held in Kansas City, Missouri over the weekend of October 26-29 2023. The convention was incredibly kind and generous and featured Jonathan as a guest of honour and Gary as a panelist. During the weekend we grabbed long-time friends of the podcast Kij Johnson and Jeffrey Ford and attempted to discuss 'the art of narrative' or perhaps how you go about finding and telling a story.  The conversation was interesting and we hope you enjoy it. Our thanks to everyone at the Kansas City convention, but special thanks to co-chair Rosemary Williams and her spouse, both of whom went far above and beyond to make sure you got to hear this recording. See you again soon!

Responding in part to some issues raised by Niall Harrison in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Jonathan and Gary discuss the value and purpose of year’s best anthologies, whether it’s even possible to still represent such a diversified international field, and how stories we read in anthologies frame our own reading experiences and help us discover exciting new writers. Needless to say, a lot of digressions leads us into some other topics as well.

For this episode, Jonathan and Gary are joined by the distinguished novelist, editor, and scholar Jack Dann, whose new The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History: A Handbook on Craft, Art, and History has just been published by Bloomsbury Academic. Jack discusses definitions of alternate history (as opposed to secret history or parallel universes), his own work in developing his da Vinci novel The Memory Cathedral and his more recent Shadows in the Stone, the responsibilities of the alternate history writer, some key writers and texts, and some recent trends in alternate history fiction.

In a return to classic rambling form, Jonathan and Gary begin thinking about the waning months of the year, and the inevitable recommended reading discussions. Jonathan starts off by asking why we always seem to say it was a surprisingly good year for collections, when just about every year is a good year for collections. We also touch upon anthologies, such as Jared Shunn’s massive The Big Book of Cyberpunk, and what implicit arguments are being made by such broadly inclusive anthologies. We also touch upon Jonathan’s brand-new The Book of Witches, the question of whether SFF is starting to mature enough that broadly diverse voices are viewed as simply part of the mainstream of the field, and some of the books we’ve been reading or anticipating, including Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill and Aliz E. Harrow’s Starling House (both will be guests on a future podcast), Tobias S. Buckell’s A Stranger in the Citadel, Nicola Griffith’s Menewood (and how historical fiction relates to SFF),The Best of Michael Swanwick, and Christopher Barzak’s Monstrous Alterations.

This week Hugo and Nebula nominee Wole Talabi joins Jonathan and Gary for a wide-ranging discussion celebrating the publication of his wonderful first novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon and his Hugo Award-nominated novelette, "A Dream of Electric Mothers". We discuss the recent worldwide recognition of African SFF, his use of Yoruba religion and mythology in his novel, the importance of movies (especially heist movies)to his work, the nature of Africanfuturism, his attraction to SF as a professional engineer, and his future plans—including a new volume of short fiction due next spring.

After Gary enjoyed a weekend at Readercon, we’re back with another one-on-one ramble that covers topics from the proliferation of SF awards (and what they really might be for), to some recent and forthcoming books we’re excited about (including Kemi Ashing-Giwa's The Splinter in the Sky, Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors, Wole Talabi’s Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, and Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory), the question of whether anthologies might rightly or wrongly be seen as definitive, and the importance of supporting short fiction publications given some major changes facing the field in 2023. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.

After an unplanned hiatus, we’re back with the wonderful Kij Johnson, who will be a guest of honour at this year’s World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City this coming October. Small Beer will publish a new collection of Kij's work, The Privilege of the Happy Ending, to coincide with the convention. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of teaching fiction writing in workshops versus university creative writing programs, how the workshop and the reading group have become so important to new writers since the early days of Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight’s Milford, the different problems of writing short stories, novellas, or novels, the balance between estrangement and immersion in stories, and Kij’s own current and recent work, which ranges from experimental fiction to stories that revisit older writers like Lovecraft and Kenneth Grahame. As always, Kij is bristling with good ideas, and we could easily have gone on for another hour.