The Coode Street Podcast

The Coode Street Advent Calendar rolls into the fifth day, and this time Gary takes a little time to chat with the wonderful Sam J. Miller about his new novella, Kid Wolf and Kraken Boy, and his short story collection, Boys, Beasts & Men. There's also, no doubt, some holiday chat with books and such being recommended. As always, our thanks to Sam and we hope you enjoy the episode!

For the fourth instalment of the Coode Street Advent Calendar, Jonathan called New Orleans to talk to exciting debut author Alex Jennings about how he was still envious about not having made it to the World Fantasy Convention there. The conversation also touched on what Alex had been reading, what they have coming out, and their fabulous first novel, The Ballad of Perilous Graves, which Alex describes as "a Blaxploitation Pippi Longstocking adventure"!!! As always, we hope you enjoy the conversation.

The third day of the Coode Street Advent Calendar sees Gary talking to long-time podcast favourite Aliette de Bodard about their year in reading and writing, their new novella,  Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, and the first ever Xuya universe novel,  The Red Scholar’s Wake. As always, we hope you enjoy the conversation!

For the second day of the Coode Street Advent Calendar, Jonathan sits down to chat with the delightful Kelly Barnhill, whose novels When Women Were Dragons and The Ogress and the Orphans came out this year. Both are highly recommended. Enjoy!

The end of the year is fast approaching, and this year the Coode Street Podcast is doing something a little different. We've invited 24 creators of some of this year’s best and most interesting books to join us for ten minutes or so to talk about what they're reading now, their favourite holiday reads, what they had out this year, and what they’ve got coming out in the year ahead. It’s a Coode Street Advent Calendar if that’s your thing, or just a run-up to December 24 for book lovers. Today's guest is the wonderful Nicola Griffith, the multiple award-winning author of Ammonite, Slow River, Hild, and many more. Her brilliant queer recasting of the Arthurian story, Spear, was published earlier this year.

With the end of the year almost upon us, Coode Street was looking for a way to celebrate the books we read and loved during 2022. We also wanted to help you find something great to read for yourself or for someone close to you. And so the 2022 Coode Street Advent Calendar was born! Here are twenty-eight books that we loved and that we think you might love too. Space operas and epic fantasies, horror stories and comedies. Six-hundred page immersive tomes and light-footed short story collections.  A little bit of everything! To make this more than just a list, though, we're going to do something else. Every day between now and December 25 we're chatting with the wonderful creators of these books and asking them about what they've been reading, what holiday story they'd recommend, their own books for this year, and the ones they might have coming in 2023. Kelly Barnhill and When Women Were Dragons & The Ogress and the Orphans Richard Buttner and The Adventurists C.S.E Cooney and Saint Death's Daughter Aliette de Bodard and Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances & The Red Scholar's Wake Stephanie Feldman and Saturnalia Nicola Griffith and Spear Elizabeth Hand and Hokuloa Road Alix E. Harrow and A Mirror Mended Kate Heartfield and The Embroidered Book N.K. Jemisin and The World We Make Alex Jennings and The Ballad of Perilous Graves Guy Gavriel Kay and All the Seas of the World Paul McAuley and Beyond the Burn Line Sam J. Miller and Kid Wolf and Kraken Boy & Boys, Beasts & Men Tamsyn Muir and Nona the Ninth Sequoia Nagamatsu and How High We Go in the Dark Tochi Onyebuchi and Goliath M. Rickert and Lucky Girl: How I Became a Horror Writer Kelly Robson and High Times in the Low Parliament Christopher Rowe and These Prisoning Hills Rachel Swirsky and January Fifteenth Lavie Tidhar and Neom Nghi Vo and Siren Queen & Into the Riverlands Liz Williams and Embertide Neon Yang and The Genesis of Misery The sharp-eyed among you will notice that there aren't quite 28 entries in our Advent Calendar. You're right! We're still to record a few, but they should all be in place before this is done. But keep your eyes peeled for more. What else did we do? Well, it's Coode Street, so we rambled about books of the year, short story collections and more. Hope you enjoy it!

The end of the year is nigh. Jonathan and Gary are working on their year-end recommended reading, and many of us are working on our holiday shopping lists. It's that magical time of the year, for many. And so, as a little bonus, the Coode Street team are reviving the Ten-Minutes with... format and talking to twenty-four writers about what their reading, what they have coming out, and what their favourite holiday season reading is. Twenty-four writers? It's like one of those calendar-thingies you get in shops at this time of the year. Cool! We are having fun recording these episodes and, come the first of December, we hope you have fun listening!

With Gary about to leave for the World Fantasy Convention to be held in New Orleans next week, and with Jonathan in the process of assembling anthologies on the most recent iterations of space opera, we spend most of our time discussing the characteristics, history, and too-common misuse of that venerable term. While we do touch briefly on the etymology of 'space opera', and on the pulp-era adventures that Wilson Tucker had in mind when he rather contemptuously coined the term in 1941, most of the discussion focuses on how the idea has evolved since M. John Harrison set out to demolish the old-school space opera with The Centauri Device in 1974, the efforts of Paul J. McAuley and others to define a new space opera in the 1980s (and Jonathan and Gardner Dozois’s The New Space Opera anthologies of 2007 and 2010), the influence of media, and more recent examples ranging from James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series to Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti series, and other authors who have energetically begun to reclaim space opera for a more diverse cast of characters. We fully expect enthusiastic disagreements. As always, we hope you enjoy the episode. See you all again after World Fantasy!

This week Jonathan and Gary are joined by the wonderful Eileen Gunn, whose Night Shift Plus... is the latest volume in PM Press’s ongoing series of “Outspoken Authors” collections, which combine fiction and nonfiction with an author interview by series editor Terry Bisson. We discuss Eileen’s stories, her essays on Ursula K. Le Guin, Carol Emshwiller, and Gardner Dozois (and her essay on William Gibson's Neuromancer that she could not include in the collection), her earlier collections Stable Strategies and Questionable Practices, the early days of the online zine Infinite Matrix and what it was like in the early days of Microsoft, her wide range of connections in the SF world, and her fascinating novel in progress. As usual, there are digressions, but they’re pretty interesting, too.  

With the fall season of Coode Street underway, Jonathan and Gary sit down with the brilliant Ray Nayler, whose first novel The Mountain in the Sea has just been published. We touch upon the many themes of the novel, from the problems of alien communication to artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, the ethics of science, and corporate malfeasance—not to mention lots of octopuses. We also chat about his eclectic reading habits, from his early passion for Shakespeare to allusions in his novel as varied as Mary Shelley and Jack London. He also discusses his relationship to genre and how his reading and writing fit into the considerable demands of his professional career. As always, we hope you enjoy the episode!