Interview episodes
Hopeful speculative fiction with Ryka Aoki
The incredible Ursula K. Le Guin won the National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2014. In her much-shared speech, she noted that “hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives...
Body horror with Ellen Datlow
Your body is a temple – a saying that has been with us for centuries. The message: look after your body because you and it are going to be together for a long time. The body is in a symbiotic relationship with the soul: one cannot exist without the other. But what if...
“Perfect” women – with Cat Valente
The idea of perfection, the perfect being, is one of the oldest stories in the world. How that perfection might be tainted, or turn against the hand that made it, is something that has always intrigued writers of fiction. We can see this idea in stories as wide...
Female friendships – with Alix E Harrow
Female friendships tend to take a back seat in our narratives, so that when they are given the space to exist, they exist almost solely to discuss a man. Virginia Woolf once commented that "all the great women of fiction were . . . not only seen by the other sex, but...
Power and agency in dystopian YA with Melissa Welliver
Coming of age stories have long been a staple within speculative fiction genres, but in the last decade, we have seen an explosion of popularity in what publishers and booksellers refer to as YA – young adult – literature. And within that bracket, nothing is more...
The mash-up: science fiction and cosmic horror with Ada Hoffmann
The history of humanity is arguably the history of us trying to explain everything around us. Both science and religion have developed as divergent threads of this goal, inextricably linked but often at odds with one another. Science fiction and cosmic horror also...
Political fantasy with Katherine Addison
We talk about unequal societies a lot on this show, about privilege and power and who is in a position to use it. We wanted to take a critical look at a subgenre that maybe best reflects the democratic, bureaucratic society that many of us experience every day. Some...
Technology and the fear of change with Sarah Pinsker
Technological advances are incredible. Just think, the phone in your pocket is infinitely more powerful than the computers that sent the first spaceships to the moon! Technology has given us basic things we take for granted like running water and electricity, to more...
The power of love with Tasha Suri
Love can raise us up. Love can tear us down. It can be our strength, our weakness, and everything in between. And inevitably, love makes fools of us all. While we all enjoy reading a good romance, a love story is rarely just a love story. It has so many other uses...