A Meal of Thorns

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

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