The Coode Street Podcast

And now the podcast that technology did not want you to hear! When the Coode Street team traveled to Toronto, Canada for the 2012 World Fantasy Convention we planned and recorded a series of podcasts that have become known as the Great Lost Coode St Podcasts. Five podcasts cruelly wiped by idiosyncratic technology (and definitely not incompetent users) featuring Jo Walton, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Shearman & Ellen Klages, James Blaylock & Tim Powers, and Graham Joyce. This week Graham Joyce incredibly kindly agreed to try again, to join us via Skype and have an entirely new conversation about fiction, fairy tale and much, much more.  And five minutes into recording Skype, for the first time in 124 podcasts, crashed.  Ignoring all of the signals from the universe that this podcast was not meant to happen, we pushed forward and despite a slightly tinny connection and the accidental return of the dreaded stereo, ended up with a conversation that we think totally rewarded our persistence. We hope you'll agree. Our sincere thanks to Graham Joyce who persisted despite our incompetence and was exceediingly kind and generous with his time.

With jetlag slowly disappearing into the haze of memory, we once again ascended to the Waldorf Room high above the Coode St Motel 6 to discuss science fiction, list making, new writers, C.J. Cherryh, recnogition and other stuff. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

And just like that, World Fantasy Convention is a thing of the past. Awards were won, podcasts lost, and good times had by all.  This week, suffering from terrible jetlag, we muddle through a rambling discussion of some of the high points of the week in Toronto. Apologies for the odd stereo on this one. Another technical glitch, but it will be remedied next week. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.

Suffering a little from lack of sleep prior to heading off to Toronto for World Fantasy Convention, Gary and I headed up to the Waldorf Room and recorded a short podcast to keep you going till we get back. As always, we hope you enjoy it!

With the days flying by as we race towards the official appearance of The Coode St Podcast team at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto in two weeks, award-winning author and critic James Bradley joined us in the Waldorf Room to discuss science fiction, literary fiction and all sorts of other stuff. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

This week Gary and I sit down with very little planned and just talk about us.  We spent a little time discussing: Gary's Library of America series Eclipse: Online We hope you'll forgive our poor planning self-indulgence and that you enjoy the podcast!

Not so long ago we were lucky enough to have the wonderful Kij Johnson, author of the new story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees, join us in the Waldorf Room to discuss gender, transgressive fiction and other cool stuff.  That conversation was never completed, so were eager to have her back as our guest. Happily, she joins us to continue that discussion and to consider the importance of not flinching in fiction, and the recent discussion of the state of science fiction by Paul Kincaid, Jonathan McAlmont, and Mike Harrison (among others).  It proved to be a wide-ranging discussion, another total delight, and we hope the precursor to another discussion sometime soon. As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

This week we were joined in the Waldorf Room by Campell Award winning author Kathleen Ann Goonan, where we discussed the future of science fiction, teaching SF, nanotechnology, women writing hard science fiction,  her new collection Angels and You Dogs, the Nanotech Quartet, and her most recent novel, This Shared Dream.  As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!

During Episode 115 of the Podcast we discussed Paul Kincaid's review essay, "The Widening Gyre" (originally published by the LA Review of Books). In the essay, while reviewing three 'best of the year' anthologies, Paul asked whether science fiction was suffering from exhaustion and, more importantly perhaps, whether writers had lost confidence that the future was comprehensible and therefore storyable. Our original conversation didn't cover the subject well, so we invited Paul to join us in the Gershwin Room to discuss the essay and the issues surrounding it.  Our thanks to Paul for being such a generous guest and, as always, we hope you enjoy the podcast.

We are back after an unexpected break over the WorldCon weekend. We intended to have a podcast for you, and to record many, many exciting interviews. Instead, life took over and we did something else. However, we were back in the Gershwin Room this weekend to discuss the Hugo Awards, Paul Kincaid's LA Times article on the exhaustion of science fiction, and steampunk, through the lens of two very fine stories by Caitlin R. Kiernan ("Goggles (c.1910)" from Steampunk 3) and Nick Mamatas ("Arbeitschraft" from The Mammoth Book of Steampunk). As always, we hope you enjoy the podcast!