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Kickstarter page image for The Cookout anthology, featuring a ticket, a flying saucer, jellyfish floating in space or the sea, and various cookout foods including sausages and shish kebabs.
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Kickstarter Signal Boost: THE COOKOUT: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, Edited by Erin Brown, Emmalia Harrington, Tonya R. Moore, & P.C. Verrone

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Coming up in March we’re planning a podcast Signal Boost interview with writer/editor Tonya R. Moore about The Cookout, an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories by Black authors of the African diaspora, centering on the traditions of “the cookout” — the joy, the drama, and the delicious food! A Kickstarter campaign is currently going on to support the anthology and help pay the contributors, who include Brent Lambert, Eden Royce, DaVaun Sanders, and Sheree Renée Thomas to date. There is just FIVE more days left to support this campaign, before we have the live recording with Moore or are able to release the podcast, so we’re also boosting this now on the blog. They are close to their goal, so be sure to check it out and help if you are able! Moore is a Jamaican speculative fiction writer and editor based in Florida. She is the editor-in-chief at Rogue Star Magazine, Poetry Editor at Solarpunk Magazine, and an associate writer at Galactic Journey. Her latest short story publications include “Water Baby”, published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and “Anansi and the Astronaut”, published in the Spacefunk! Anthology. Moore is co-editing the collection with three others: 1) Erin Brown, a poet and author of horror, fabulist, and fantasy short fiction who has been published in FIYAH, Nightmare, Midnight and Indigo, The Deadlands, and many other venues, 2) Emmalia Harrington, a disabled QBIPOC novelist of Walk on Grey Ruins, whose short stories can be found at FIYAH, Abyss and Apex, Flame Tree Press, and elsewhere, and 3) P.C. Verrone, an author and playwright whose work has appeared in FIYAH, Nightmare, PodCastle, and numerous anthologies, and whose debut novel Rabbit, Fox, Tar is forthcoming from Catapult this year. Why The Cookout? How did this idea come about? Find more information on The Cookout and its editors/contributors on its website. And help support the project on Kickstarter.

Cover of Folklore: A journey through the past and present, by Owen Davies & Ceri Houlbrook, with an old-fashioned font for Folklore, and featuring lots of icons such as brooms, crowns, rings, bows, crosses, buckets, trees, etc.
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Book Review: Folklore, by Davies and Houlbrook

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In Folklore: A Journey through the Past and Present, co-authors Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook take a scholarly but very readable look at British folklore. They convincingly treat folklore as an evolving presence in culture, not just the remnants of a vanished past (and they point out that even a lot of allegedly ancient customs are actually relatively modern). I’m no expert in the subject, but the authors’ broad grasp of the subject and reasoning about its various aspects seem quite sound. I found the book very interesting and often extremely entertaining.

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Book Review: The Harbors of the Sun by Martha Wells

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I’ve made no bones of the fact that I am a fan of Martha Wells. I’ve read her work, in toto, since the nineties, starting in those days when I took a look at Nebula and Hugo nomination lists and took them as straight-up reading guides. Her Ile-Rien Nebula-nominated novel Death of the Necromancer introduced me to her work, then, and I moved forward from there. The Cloud Roads, in 2011, started a new universe for her. A world with many humanoid species living in a welter of civilizations and cultures, current and past. A world where two species above all were focused. The Fell, ravenous, destructive and dangerous shapeshifters, their Flights devastating to all, a threat to any and every community. And then there were the Raksura, a shapeshifting species far, far more benign to their neighbors. A species rich in culture and internal society, a matrilineal culture built around courts ruled by Queens, with their consorts and a couple of subvarieties of the species providing a rich social environment. One problem the Raksura have is that their more aggressive flying forms have more than a passing resemblance to the Fell, and so with few exceptions, the Raksura treat with other species in their humanoid form secretly, or not at all. Into this mix, enter Moon…

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Month of Joy: Cooking and a Recipe by Cora Buhlert

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A few weeks ago, I chanced to read this article at the Guardian about the history of the premade sandwich. It’s a fascinating article and you should definitely read it. But what struck me was this quote by one Roger Whiteside, head of Marks & Spencer’s sandwich department in the 1980s: “Once you are time-strapped and you have got cash, the first thing you do is get food made for you […] Who is going to cook unless you are a hobbyist?” This quote not just made me bristle, it also baffled me. It baffled me as much as the lawyer from New York City whom I met online in the early days of the Internet and who told me that his family never cooks, whereupon I blurted out, “But what do you eat then?”

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Guest Post: “Tackling Other Cultures in Fiction” by Stina Leicht

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All fantasy authors write about foreign cultures and countries they’ve never visited. When an author makes up an imaginary place, that is what they’re doing. Elizabeth Moon told me that back when I first started writing Of Blood and Honey. She was right, of course, but that didn’t remove the anxiety I (rightfully) felt when tackling Northern Ireland as a setting. There were many reasons why. Shortly after the start of my research, I attended a literary discussion about fantasy and foreign myth appropriation. It was the first time I’d heard the word ‘colonialism’ associated with genre fiction. One of the panelists was an author who worked with an American Indian tribe. She said that everything else had been taken from Native Americans and that disrespectfully stealing their myths made everything worse. She said she felt that fantasy writers had a responsibility to the cultures they borrow from — a responsibility to do thorough, thoughtful research and to be careful and respectful with the borrowed myths. One audience member loudly disagreed. He said that everyone has been perfectly fine with doing whatever they wanted with Irish myth for decades. No one complained. However, that story-mine was now tapped. It was time fantasy writers moved on to other cultures, and they had

The Skiffy and Fanty Show Podcasts

Episode 53 — Religion in SF and Why Fantasy is More Popular

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http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/www.archive.org/download/TheSkiffyAndFantyShow4.0b–ReligionInSfAndWhyFantasyIsMore/Sandf–Episode4.0b–ReligionInSfAndThePopularityOfFantasy.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSThe second half of our super special episode is jam packed with skiffy and fanty goodness.  Jason Sanford, John Ottinger, and Adam take part in our discussion of religion in science fiction and why we think fantasy is more popular than science fiction.  More bad jokes are had at Shaun’s expense, but he eventually gets his revenge… Tune in and enjoy! Note:  If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below): Episode 53 — Download (MP3) Discussion (0:00 – 1:00:46) Jason Sanford’s Website Never Never Stories (a short story collection from Jason Sanford) Grasping For the Wind (John Ottinger’s blog) Adam’s Blog Our new intro music is “Time Flux” by Revolution Void (CC BY 3.0). That’s all, folks!  Thanks for listening.  See you next week.

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