Blog Posts

Awards Season

2018 Awards Season Eligibility: Our Things, Guest Things, All the Things

/

2017 might not have been the best year for the world, but it was a pretty good year for our little podcast. We added a few new shows, produced a whole lot of great content (thanks to Jen’s diligent work as producer), and brought on a whole lot of new voices. We also got this flashy new website (thanks, Jade!) due to our Patreon supporters being awesome. As we do every year, we like to share all of the awards eligible things created by us, our crew, and our guests. Where relevant, we’ve linked to individual creator’s eligibility posts on their websites. As always, we thank you for taking the time to check out this post and for considering us, our crew, and/or our guests for things in the 2018 awards season (Hugos, Nebulas, and more). Here goes: 

Blog Posts

Bedtime Stories: Dragon Dancer

/

Bedtime Stories is a new column that will highlight Children’s Books with a diverse, global perspective. It is the eve of Chinese New Year! Lanterns are hung in the shopping malls and Yao is preparing to wake the ancient sky dragon, Shen Long, from his year-long sleep. Soon Yao will be propelled on a magical journey to battle the bad luck of the previous year and usher in the good. Will he succeed? Will his grandfather watch over him and protect him from harm? Dragon Dancer, written by Joyce Chng and illustrated by Jérémy Pailler, was originally published in the UK by Lantana Publishing, but just became available in the US in January and we are the richer for it.

Blog Posts

Book Review: Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra

/

Orders of female warriors, psychic weapons and quests for revenge are at the centre of Rati Mehrotra’s debut novel Markswoman. Nearly a thousand years after an apocalypse, humanity lives on in clans, and executions are carried out by orders of elite warriors. Kyra belongs to the oldest of these orders: the Order of Kali. Their leader, Shirin Mam, is renowned for her wisdom and power. Things begin to go wrong when Kyra returns one day to discover Shirin Mam is dead. Although the death appears natural, Kyra is convinced her mentor has been murdered… and she’s pretty sure she knows the culprit. It is up to her to claim justice.

Blog Posts

Month of Joy: Ramblings on Biology Simple and Profound by Daniel Haeusser

/

It has taken me all of this month to figure out what to write. It often seemed like joy has been eluding me, what with the dire and painful state of so much sociopolitically in the world. It took me awhile to step back and remember just how much joy there is, all around. The Earth teems with it. When I was a younger reader I discovered books on the topic of cryptozoology, ones by Ivan T. Sanderson on through modern authors. The lure behind the idea that there might still be fantastic beasts out there in the world to discover fueled my excitement, hope, and imagination. But finding these cryptids, if they did exist, would certainly not be easy, and I was no Newt Scamander. However, one of the creatures the authors of these books brought up had been ‘discovered’ and scientifically recognized, despite first thought a myth by Europeans. That animal is the okapi, a half-zebra-half-giraffe animal from the dense jungles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The okapi stuck in my mind as something rare and miraculous, a fantastic beast that I might actually be able to see.

Blog Posts

Month of Joy: The Comforting Embrace of Horror by David Annandale

/

For my contribution to the theme of this month, I was originally going to put together a short list. But the more I thought about one of the entries on that list, the more I felt I had to devote the entire post to this one book, and even that would fall short of doing it justice. Because if there is one book that has brought me more joy than any other, it would have to be Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Gifford’s tome came into my life in March of 1976, and it changed everything. I was already obsessed with monsters and dinosaurs, and I bought the book because it had pictures of the biggest dinosaur I had ever seen: Godzilla. Gifford’s text introduced me to the wonders of the cinema of Georges Méliès and James Whale and Val Lewton, to German Expressionism, to Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and in short defined the academic, creative and professional paths the rest of my life would take.

Blog Posts

Month of Joy: Oyster Fritters by Joyce Chng

/

In a lot of my stories, you will find recipes and cooking tips. Why? Because cooking brings me joy. Reading a recipe book is visual pleasure for me. I love going through my mom’s collection of recipe books, some of which date back from the 1970s. (Note: SFF writers, read widely — recipe books are legit reading and world-building  material). So… my Month of Joy post will focus on… oyster fritters. In some places, we also call them oyster cakes. My dad got me into it and for years now, we love the sheer pleasure of biting into a piping hot oyster shaped like a disc or UFO.

Scroll to Top