A Meal of Thorns

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

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

We’re closing out this strange year with a “big-picture” episode: editor & critic Dan Hartland is on to talk about trends and directions—or lack thereof—in recent speculative fiction. We talk about the interesting spread of books & awards this year, do some armchair speculating about genre shifts & their accompanying arguments, and have some very insider-baseball discussion of what gets reviewed (or not) and why. And, of course, Dan and Casella talk about their favorite reads from 2025.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Guest: Dan Hartland

Host:Jake Casella Brookins

Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia

Artwork byRob Patterson

Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

Critical Friends podcast

Gautam Bhatia's The Sentence

Vajra Chandrasekera's Rakesfall

Award spread this year- see for instance SFADB

Article on UK romantasy sales numbers

Romantasy, LitRPG, Progression Fantasy, Baen Books

Locus

SFT= Speculative Fiction in Translation

Strange Horizons issue on the NEA cuts and SFT

Richard K. Morgan

Orbus by Neal Asher

Jenny Hamilton’s work at Reactor

AO3= Archive Of Our Own

When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift

Metal from Heaven by August Clarke

Niall Harrison’s review of Swift

William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy

Hugboxing vs Scab-Picking

H.G. Wells

Sylvia Park's Luminous

Eva Meijer’s Sea Now, tr. Anne Thompson Melo

The Booker Prize

“Prestige TV in the Time of Climate Change” by Sarah Miller

The Sopranos & Breaking Bad

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien

Hannah Arendt & Baruch Spinoza

John Wyndham & J.G. Ballard

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, tr. Sarah Moses

Becky Chambers

Colourfields by Paul Kincaid

Margaret Killjoy's A Country of Ghosts

The Expansion Project by Ben Pester

The Goldsmiths Prize

Olga Ravn's The Employees

Jeff VanderMeer's Area X

Ned Beauman

BSFA short SF in translation award

Translated Hugo Initiative

Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, tr. Rahul Berry

Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide

Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors

Christopher Priest

Debbie Urbanski's Portalmania

Thomas Ha's Uncertain Sons

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others

Leyna Krow's Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids

Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis

Kelly Link, George Saunders, T.C. Boyle, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Elwin Cotman

Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, edited by Indrapramit Das

Countess by Suzan Palumbo

Annie Bot by Sierra Grier

Erika Swyler's We Lived On The Horizon

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Premee Mohamed

Lincoln Michel's Metallic Realms

Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams