A Meal of Thorns

In this science fiction novel, translated from the French, dreamers “dive” into their own subconscious and return with mysterious & valuable objects. Translator, author, & scholar Alexander Dickow joins to discuss Francophone SF, weird fiction, and artistic allegories & analogies.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Alexander Dickow

Title: The Deep-Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo, translated by Edward Gauvin

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Nominate for the Hugos (if you’re eligible to)

Nominate for the Le Guin prize (open to all!)

The Translated Hugo Initiative

Alexander’s Strange Horizons article on Francophone SF

China Miéville

Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

Poets Skip Fox & Ian Seeds

Emil Petaja’s The Nets of Space

Philippe Curval

Kilgore Trout

Alfred Jarry & ‘Pataphysics

Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov

Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan

Philip K. Dick

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?/Bladerunner

PKD’s The Galactic Pot Healer, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Ubik

Nathalie Sarraute’s work on Proust (possibly in The Age of Suspicion)

Tolkien's “Leaf By Niggle”

Harrison's Clomping Foot of Nerdism

C.J. Cherryh's Wave Without A Shore

Samuel Richardson

Walter Scott

Keats’ letter to Woodhouse: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence.”

PKD’s A Scanner Darkly

“Smellevision replaces television”

Zachary Gillan’s work on the "Weird Art Story"

Richard Gavin

Alexander’s “The Weird and the Fantastic: Genre in Theory and Genre as History”

Laurent Genefort

Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author

Honoré de Balzac

Samatar's Olondriannovels

Ray Bradbury's "The Jar"

Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun

"Anti-fantasy"

Christopher Nolan's Inception

JJ Abram's “Mystery Box” (blech boo hiss)

Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart

Alexander's Linktree

Alain Damasio’s The Horde of the Counterwind

Reviewer and historian Liz Bourke joins to discuss religion, historical overlaps, and examinations of gender in Paladin of Souls and fantasy more generally.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Liz Bourke

Title: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

Blood Tide by Sophie Burnham

Jen Lyons' Green and Deadly Things

Hiron Ennes’ The Works of Vermin

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station

Bret Devereaux’s series on military-historical realism in Tolkien; see for instance “The Siege of Gondor Part IV”

McMaster’s Curse of Chalion, Penric & Desdemona series, Vorkosigan series

Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love

Bioware's Dragon Age games

Cult of Asclepius

Tolkien's idea of the “eucatastrophe”

M. Night Shyamalan

Mythopoeia

Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories

Liz's bluesky & website

Greg Egan’s work exemplifies a certain kind of “hard” science fiction: not that it’s obsessed with big manly space battles, but rather that it’s using science to really dig into some complicated subjects. Eden Kupermintz, of Death // Sentence and many other cool projects, joins to discuss the scope and the scale, philosophy and physics in Diaspora.

 

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

 

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Eden Kupermintz

Title: Diaspora by Greg Egan

Host: Jake Casella Brookins

Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia

Additional music:

"Equatorial Complex" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

"Fluidscape" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Artwork by Rob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

The Translated Hugo Initiative

Brian Catling's Earwig

Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy

Jeff VanderMeer's The Strange Bird

Jeremy P. Bushnell's Relentless Melt

Severian (from Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun)

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

"Every text is ergodic if you want it to be."

Pink Floyd's Stairway to Heaven

Heavy Blog is Heavy

Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora, translated by Rahul Bery

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieve, translated by Rahul Bery

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer

Enrigue in discussion with Maia Gil’Adí (friend of the pod) on Novel Dialogue

Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation & Authority (and the Meal of Thorns episode)

Dan Simmons’ Hyperion

Ursula Le Guin's Ekumen (in the Hainish books)

Ben Berman Ghan’s The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits & Eden's review

Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Starmaker

Greg Egan's Scale

Backlisted episode on Last and First Men

David Hume

leptons & femtoseconds

Gilles Deleuze & Jacques Derrida

Immanuel Kant & correlationism

Egan's Perihelion Summer

Socrates & Plato & the polis

solipsism

Edwin A. Abbot's Flatland

Zelazny, Le Guin, Dick, Asimov

Peter Watts' Blindsight

Becky Chambers' To Be Taught If Fortunate

Egan's Morphotropic

Larry Niven (e.g., Ringworld)

"I know kung fu" scene in The Matrix

Pragmatism, coherence, William James

The Best of Greg Egan

Permutation City

Greg Daniel’s Upload series

The Orthogonal Rocket trilogy

Zendegi

Karen Burnham's Modern Masters of SF book on Egan

MMSF on Ballard, Bester

Frederick Pohl's Gateway

Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero

Wells, Camille Flammarion, Flash Gordon, Star Trek & Star Wars

M. John Harrison’s The Centauri Device

Gareth Watkin's essay on AI & fascism

John M. Ford's Web of Angels on Death // Sentence

GregEgan.net

Charles Saunders’ sword and soul narratives, pulp-fantasy-inspired tales of Black and African heroes, helped blaze a trail for the genre—but, like Saunders himself, they have a complicated and still-developing story. Jon Tattrie, author of the newly-released Saunders biography, To Leave A Warrior Behind, joins us to talk about the foundational novel Imaro: its themes, its history, and its legacy.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Jon Tattrie

Title: Imaro by Charles R. Saunders

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

To Leave A Warrior Behind

Tricon Halifax

Charles R. Saunders Prize

Trident Bookstore

Amal El-Mohtar

Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn

Jude Mire’s Patchworld Nova

Hal-Con

Shag Harbour UFO

Sword & Soul

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan

Robert E. Howard's Conan

Dark Fantasy magazine

Gene Day

Boris Vallejo & Franz Frazetta

Neuland Inline font

Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park

The Halifax Daily News

Africville

Saunder's Sweat and Soul: The Saga of Black Boxers from the Halifax Forum to Ceasar's Palace

The Quest for Cush

Dossuye

Turkana wrist knives

“thews”

Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany

N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season & our episode on it

"The City of Madness"

Octavia Butler, Toni Adeyemi

Dossoye Novels

Dhambala

Abangonee

Charles de Lint

Amazons (1986) & Stormquest (1987), both directed by Alejandro Sessa

Mathieu Da Costa

Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia

The Spirit of Africville

Audiobook of To Leave A Warrior Behind

If you read Dracula and thought: “I like the ancient shapeshifting nemesis and the homoerotic subtext, but I don’t like how subtle the sexual and national anxieties are,” you’re in luck! Editor, reviewer, and scholar Marisa Mercurio is here to talk about not-so-subtle horrors in Richard Marsh’s 1897 novel The Beetle.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Marisa Mercurio

Title: The Beetle by Richard Marsh

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

Chopin's "Minute Waltz" performed by Alfred Cortot

Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Artur Rodzinski

References:

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr

Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca & Don't Look Now

Alex Woodroe's The Night Ship

Tenebrous Press

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot

E.R. Eddison's Zimianvian trilogy

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

Kate Beaton’s “The Horror Of The New Woman”

H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

The Fly films (Kurt Neumann 1958; David Cronenberg 1986)

Phase IV directed by Saul Bass

Robert Repino's Mort(e)

The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas, and the “Valancourt Paperbacks from Hell”

Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester

Wilkie Collins

The However Improbable podcast

Marisa’s bluesky