A Meal of Thorns

In this con-coverage episode, Casella talks to folks at Readercon in Boston, including Lisa from Narrated, author Sara S. Messenger, and editor Carl Engle-Laird. We also visit Porter Square Books, an indie bookstore that has recently launched their own book review.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Readercon

Porter Square Books

Lisa from the Narrated podcast

The Hugo Awards

Elizabeth Bear’s White Space series

C.J. Cherryh & Lois McMaster Bujold

Sara S. Messenger

“Jennifer’s Daughter” in Nightmare Magazine

“When We Loved Giants” in Lightspeed

Karel Čapek

Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (good AMOT episode on that!)

AMOT episode on Ready Player One

Clark Seanor’s “Recycled Air: Wayfarers and the Tyranny of the Everyday” in Strange Horizons

Lovestruck Books in last year’s Readercon episode

Katherine @ Porter Square Books

K.A. Applegate’s Animorphsseries

Chuck Tingle

Ann Patchett’s Whistler

Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou

Roseanna Pendlebury’s review of Sour Cherry

Sunny Moraine (from our Pattern Recognition episode)

Will McMahon

Scott Edelman’s Eating the Fantastic podcast

Benjamin Rosenbaum (from our Fire Logic episode)

Carl Engle-Laird, editor at Tor

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

Jon Bois’ 17776

Cambridge Porchfest & the Good Trouble Brass Band

Gracenote & Broadsheet coffee

Thomas Wensma has an interview with Australian barista champ Jack Simpson & coffee farmer Juan Pablo Campos about the Ombligon cultivar at Perfect Daily Grind, if that caught your ear

Bujold’s Vorkosigan series & Barrayar

Josh Cook of Porter Square Books & the Porter Square Review of Books

PSB’s Bluesky

Josh’s articles at LitHub

Poly Barton’s What Am I, A Deer?

Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps & Acid Green Velvet

Literary agent and Print Run podcaster extraordinaire Laura Zats is on to talk about a novel that is the most urban fantasy you can imagine, and yet seems to run towards different traditions and ideas the closer you examine it—Robin McKinley’s award-winning but under-discussed Sunshine.

 

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

 

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Laura Zats

Title: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Host: Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Christopher Buehlman’s Blacktongue Thief & Between Two Fires

Peter Rock's Makeshift

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven

Totally not the heist film Oceans 11

Newberry Honor & Mythopoeic Award

Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries/Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood series

Kim Harrison

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Twilight & Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series

Dunning-Kruger effect

McKinley's Deerskin

Editor Sharyn November & the Firebird imprint

Charles De Lint, Anne Rice, Anita Blake

"Contemporary Fantasy"

Stephen Graham Jones

Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires & Horrorstör

Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla

Matt Kirkland’s “Dracula Daily”

RS Benedict’s “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny”

Lee Mandelo's The Woods All Black

Indra Das's The Devourers

John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids

The Print Run podcast

Erik Hane's “The Fandom Strain”

Critic & reviewer Ian Mond talks us through Tiny Deaths, a very funny and frequently morbid collection. We also think bigger: about the place and status of humor and seriousness in genre literature, and why non-genre imprints and translated literature might be places to look for this energy.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Ian Mond

Title: Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

The Writer and The Critic

Tayari Jones’ Kin

Boyhood by David Keenan

Centreouropa by Vicente Luis Mora, translated by Rahul Bery

Edward Royston’s Transgressing Time

Christopher Priest's The Recollections

Priest & Allan’s The Illuminated Man

Sturgeon's Law (“90% of everything is crap”)

Dr. Who & Stephen King

Gallifrey One convention

Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, T.C. Boyle, Kelly Link

Lisa Heschong’s Thermal Delight in Architecture

Rachel Khong’s My Dear You

The Simpsons

Blindness by José Saramago, Julio Cortázar

Shearman’s Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Everyone’s Just So So Special, and We All Hear Stories in the Dark

“Chimes At Midnight” and “The Holy Terror”

Douglas Adams

Machine of Death, edited by Ryan North

Jon Stone’s The Monster At The End Of This Book

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria

Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis

James Morrow's Towing Jehovah & Only Begotten Daughter

Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”

Leyna Krow's Sinkhole and Other Stories

Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis

Michael Swanwick & Jeffrey Ford collections

"Gate 9" in Pandemonium Waltz

Hilary Leichter, Sayaka Murata, Liliana Colanzi

Translated Hugo Initiative

Words Without Borders

Locus Award for Best Translated Novel

Isaac Fellman's Notes From A Regicide

Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Sean McTiernan's SFUltra

Locus Magazine

Ian's Substack & Facebook & Goodreads

Brunner’s prescient classic about overpopulation: is it about overpopulation? Was it prescient? And, for that matter: what does it mean to be a classic? Reviewer and editor Dan Hartland joins to discuss these questions and more.

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Dan Hartland

Title: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Strange Horizon’s 2026 fund-drive

Strange Horizons’ Critical Friends podcast

The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan

Prism, Plastic, Void by Violet Allen

This Is How You Lose The Time War by Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

We The Parasites by A.V. Marraccini 

Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Trade of Blood, Mr. Shivers, and Divine Cities trilogy

Orion’s “SF Masterworks” series

Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War

The Club Of Rome’s report “The Limits to Growth”

Brunner’s “Club or Rome Quartet”: Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, Shockwave Rider, Jagged Orbit

John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy

New Worlds magazine

"New Wave" science fiction

Timothy Leary

The Beatles’ Please Please Me versus Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Jad Smith’s John Brunner

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s The Sirens of Titan & Cat's Cradle

William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson

Thomas Disch's 334 & Camp Concentration

The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne Howland Ehrlich

Soylent Green, dir. Richard Fleischer

Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic”

Vajra Chandrasekera

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Network, dir. Sidney Lumet

Marshall McLuhan

Taylor Sheridan & John Linson’s Yellowstone series

Transmetropolitan comic series by Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson et al.

Going Rogue podcast

Warren Ellis sexual coercion allegations; lots more but here’s an early overview from the Guardian

“FogHorn Barge” from Daniel Simon @ SoundBible, CC BY 3.0

James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand

David Runciman’s “Are we doomed?” for LRB

Degrowth

KSR’s The Ministry for the Future

E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again

Strange Horizons’ “Ageing in Science Fiction” special issue

Shintaro Kago’s Dementia 21

Julia Armfield’s Private Rites

Jacqueline Nyathi’s Harare Review of Books

David Brin's Earth

Jerry Pournelle

Dan's Bluesky

The Clarke shortlist discussion will appear on Nerds of a Feather

Tenacious D

The Long Winters

The Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA)

Science fiction readers love a mechanism, they love a bit of world-building and mystery-solving. Premee Mohamed joins us to discuss Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a book that asks: what if a science fiction book intentionally avoided all of that? 

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Premee Mohamed

Title: The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Mercutio by Kate Heartfield

Pretenders to the Throne of God by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Orbit 10 anthology edited by Damon Knight

William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say” and its many responses

Premee’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight

Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon

Heart of Darkness by Josef Conrad

The Vorrh by B. Catling

The face dancers from Frank Herbert’s Dune series

Mystique and the Kree from the Marvel/X-Men comics

Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

Premee’s The Butcher of the Forest & Wickhills

"sentients" & "sapients"

“The Great Chain of Being”

Star Wars series The Bad Batch and The Clone Wars

Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead

Octavia Butler's Dawn

Tolkien's On Fairy Stories

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? & Ridley Scott's Bladerunner

Premee’s The Siege of Burning Grass

Hilary Putnam's “Twin Earth”

Premee's Patreon, Website, Bluesky

Wickhills & From the Library of Jurgen Leitner

The Carl Brandon Society