The Coode Street Podcast

Hosts Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe have created a relaxed and knowledgeable podcast about books and the science fiction community. They frequently have read and praised the best books of the year before they become available to the public, which is valuable to any reader.

As The Coode Street Podcast has matured, their interviews have improved and become the strength of the podcast. I would go so far as to say that these interviews have become important listening for anyone interested in science fiction, fantasy, and related fiction.

Here’s an overview of interviews so far in 2012 that were remarkable:

Elizabeth Hand
Hand discusses her two new novels, Available Dark (sequel to Generation Loss) and Radiant Days. Gary Wolfe suggests that the arts are central to Hand’s recent work, which frequently deal with struggling artists, photographers, painters, the theatre, and Rimbaud in Radiant Days. Hand finds that novella-length may be her natural story length. (follow here)

Ellen Kushner
Kushner shares the process of adapting her novel Swordpoint into an audio book, available on Audible.com. (follow here)

Barry Malzberg
Malzberg, a grand old man of the science fiction field, whose memories and experiences are a treasure, advances his theory that the 1950s is the Golden Age of science fiction. Kindly overlook the comically maladroit use of Skype. (follow here)

Michael Dirda
Essayist and long-time book reviewer for the Washington Post, Dirda shares his enthusiasm for the fathers of genre fiction: Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. (follow here)

Peter Straub
Straub and his hosts consider the wonders and joys of reading Gene Wolfe (I could listen to listen to them talk about Gene Wolfe all day long). Straub praises the work of Brian Evenson and Caitlín Keirnan. He calls Keirnan’s new book, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012), a masterpiece. They discuss the limitations of genre boundaries and the Library of America’s notions of genre. (follow here)

Older episodes of The Coode Street Podcast have featured many fine guests, including Ursula K. Le Guin. Unfortunately they spent the Le Guin interview discussing the (by all accounts) under-informed book of essays about science fiction by Margaret Atwood, instead of talking about something more interesting, like what writing Le Guin herself is working on, or what books that she has read recently that she is excited about.

A list of prior guests reads like a Who’s Who of the science fiction community: Kim Stanley Robinson, Ian McDonald. Alastair Reynolds, Jo Walton, John Clute, Ellen Klages, Eileen Gunn, Geoff Ryman, Terry Bisson, Greg Bear, Karen Lord, Ellen Datlow, Jeffrey Ford and many others.

Black and White on Blackout

Below are two views of Connie Willis’s new book, Blackout (Ballantine/Spectra, 2010), the first half of her long-anticipated novel about London during the Blitz. The concluding half, All Clear, is due to be published October 2010.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Blackout plunges the reader right into the middle of three key happenings of 1940: the rescue of the British troops from Dunkirk, the evacuation of children to rural villages and country houses, and the life of ordinary Londoners during the Blitz. Every detail rings true, with the kind of authority that only intense research can bring. Still, all of Willis's knowledge is subsumed in her bravura storytelling: Blackout is, by turns, witty, suspenseful, harrowing and occasionally comic to the point of slapstick.

. . . It's hard to know what to praise more in Blackout, whether the comic misadventures of Eileen, or the nightmarish confusion of Dunkirk and its aftermath, or Polly's growing affection for the people with whom she shares a bomb shelter. (Full review.)

Nick Mamatas at Sci Fi Wire:

It's been nine years since Connie Willis' last novel, and the many fans of this winner of a record 10 Hugo Awards for fiction felt like they'd been waiting forever. And yet Blackout, a time-travel novel about historians in the Second World War, is just, dare we say it, a waste of time.

. . . Blackout starts very slowly. The first few dozen pages are much like standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Nobody knows anything, the waits are interminable, and management is entirely unavailable. Sci-fi is supposed to be an escape from the dreariness of everyday life; time travel to a war is supposed to be exciting, or at least terrifying. Instead, we live the life of a historian named Michael Davis, who goes back in time and misses the bus.

. . . War is days of tedium interspersed with moments of sheer terror, but Willis only wrote the tedium. (Full review.)