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Announcements and Errata

Announcing Our New Main Co-Host: Brandon O’Brien

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Today is a very special day. It’s the day we announce a new main co-host for The Skiffy and Fanty Show and the birthday of said new main co-host. That’s right! The most incredible Brandon O’Brien will take on the role of main co-host! You might know Brandon as occasional guest and one of the hosts of Righteous Kicks, a Kamen Rider podcast hosted here. Brandon is also an incredible writer, editor, and TTRPG designer who has DMed games for Speculate! His work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Arsenika, Anathema, Fireside Magazine, and elsewhere. Basically, Brandon is awesome, and we’re super excited to have him take on a bigger role here! Oh, and today is Brandon’s birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRANDON! Welcome to the Skiffy and Fanty bunker, where you’ll get to ride a unicorn and have a conversation with an alien! Here’s to exciting adventures ahead!

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Book Review: ESCAPE POD Edited by Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya

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The eponymous Escape Pod represents a ‘best-of’ anthology of sorts, celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the audio short fiction podcast. Edited by Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya, the book features some of the biggest names in speculative fiction published through the podcast’s history. While I don’t have interest in listening to stories, I adore them in print form, and this collection from Titan Books offers a diverse selection of high-quality writing. With the current exclusive focus of Skiffy & Fanty on writers/works by the BIPOC community, I’ll highlight here that this collection features superb stories by Maurice Broaddus and N.K. Jemisin. In what follows, I’ll briefly review the stories in this collection.

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Book Review: THE RAGE OF DRAGONS by Evan Winter

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Evan Winter self-published The Rage of Dragons in 2017. It soon received notice from an editor at Orbit, and in 2019 the publisher gave a freshly edited version of the novel a release, along with a deal for three further novels in its series entitled The Burning. The second novel of the series, The Fires of Vengeance, has recently been released, and a copy I picked up of that from my local bookshop (for this purchase, the aptly named Burning Books) now sits on my massive TBR stack.  If you’re a regular follower of Skiffy & Fanty, you probably have already at least heard of The Rage of Dragons and its author. We featured Winter in episode #53 of the Signal Boost series (found here), and my fellow reviewer Paul Weimer praised the novel on Goodreads and Twitter. Paul even included it among books recommended to his followers at the start of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, right as we all began self-isolating and looking for worlds to escape into within pages. (Also: see Paul’s review on Barnes & Noble here).

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“Sharing Worlds: The Story of the Stories” by Gillian Polack

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I have two new novels out, both having to emerge with the lack of fanfare that we’re accustomed to in 2020. They were written a decade apart. One is published in Australia and the other in New Zealand. One is set in a world far in time and space where the government has brought back the eighteenth century. The other is set last year, in rural Australia. You can find more about both of them here. They have several things in common. The most important is that I did not write them alone. I am active in fandom and my fannish habits peeped into my work and changed it. Poison and Light is part of a shared universe. The original concept came when my historian self whispered to my writing self, “I have an idea.” However, an ezine and an anthology containing much work by other writers were released long, long before my version of things saw light of day. As a result the New Ceres universe has two quite different paths, but that’s another story.

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2021 Awards Season Eligibility

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It’s that time of year when everyone puts up their eligibility posts for stuff released in 2020. For our show, it’s pretty easy to identify where we’re eligible: Hugo Award for Best Fancast (finalists in 2014, 2019, and 2020) Unlike previous years, we’re probably not eligible for other categories, though being a podcast, we’re probably eligible for other podcast-friendly awards. So if you see something we’d be a good fit for, have at it! As always, we appreciate your support and love, and we do hope you’ll stick around with us through 2021 and beyond! Of course, it’s not just about us. Our show featured contributions from folks who may be eligible for other things, Hugos and otherwise! As we do every year, we’ve listed them here with links to their websites. We encourage you to visit their individual sites, as they may release eligibility posts of their own or may have novels, short fiction, and other forms of content for which they are eligible. Here’s the list:

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Holy Shit! Representation Matters! Or, How SFF Helped Me Realize I’m Nonbinary

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I can’t really tell you why I’m here saying I’m non-binary instead of saying I’m redefining cishet masculinity. One just feels more true to me than the other, and I say that with huge amounts of love and respect to everyone of all genders. —Jonathan Alexandratos, “How Geek Culture Made Me Realize I Am Non-Binary” I’m trans/nonbinary. I use nonbinary pronouns such as they/them, and I came to this bit of self-knowledge through the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) community. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t come to this realization about myself while in college while I minored in women’s & gender studies. I minored in gender studies because I liked thinking and talking about feminism, racial justice, art, culture, politics, and activism. I also really liked talking about gender. I thought that was just because I hated sexism, the patriarchy, and toxic masculinity. In college, I didn’t begin to think: maybe I like talking about gender because I’m trans/nonbinary. And why would I? I knew trans and nonbinary people existed, but they weren’t on my radar. Back in college, I had heard of nonbinary people, but that was about it. I rarely encountered anyone who was nonbinary or genderqueer. As far as I was aware, I didn’t personally know any trans people. I knew the definitions of transgender and cisgender, but I didn’t know all that much about trans or nonbinary people.  I had never really been asked to make space for trans people, and I hardly ever saw others make space for trans people. I rarely came across media representation of trans or nonbinary people, much less good representation, much less consistent good representation.

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