Many apologies to those (Fred!) who have been waiting for this episode–I (Karen Burnham) can only plead extreme mental discombobulation. And we hope it is worth the wait!

We will have a little bit of in-between-season content, since Gary K. Wolfe has agreed to join us and talk a little bit more about Cordwainer Smith. And of course we reserve the right to throw out a “special” podcast when the mood suits us! But the main plan is to start Season 3 in the Winter, focusing on international (non US/UK/Australia) science fiction and only tackling one short story per episode. A few that we’re definitely going to cover include “A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia and translated by Ken Liu, and Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” in the original Spanish. We’ll also be choosing stories from Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird, Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic ed. by Eduardo Jimenez Mayo and Chris N. Brown, and AfroSF, ed. Ivor Hartmann. If you have any short fiction that you think we should tackle, please leave a note in the comments!

We recorded this podcast live when Karen Lord visited me in Houston, TX. As such, I managed to screw up the recording in a whole new way. The sound level is very low even after boosting, and yet you can easily hear my dog chewing a bone through the first half of the podcast (we didn’t have the heart to kick her out of the living room), and the fireworks from the next town over in the second half. I had the best luck listening to this episode on headphones with the sound cranked up. My apologies as always, but for our next season wrap-up episode we’ll be back in the comfortable realm of Skype recordings.

We wound up finding so much to say about Smith’s stories that we decided to break this episode into two parts. In this installment we discuss “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” (1961) and “On the Gem Planet” (1963).

We wound up finding so much to say about Smith’s stories that we decided to break this episode into two parts. In this installment we discuss “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950) and “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul” (1960). In the next installment we’ll finish the conversation with “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” (1961) and “On the Gem Planet” (1965).

In one fell swoop we cover some of the most recent fiction yet (2008) and some of the oldest (1884). We hope you will agree that they are worth talking about together. Math fiction of many dimensions.

Murphy introduces some fascinating ideas, but undercuts them with info-dumping and a muddled ending. Dom has the ability to see and control numbers. After running from a desert confrontation between two other numerates, he ends up in a small Utah town with an adjunct spirit called Billy riding along in his head. Along with a raw numerate named Jenna, Dom and Billy head north while avoiding their foes. The magic system itself is fascinating, if dubious at times, but the lengthy explanations often slow the story down. The final 50 pages then turn into a race to cram too much action into a sloppy and chaotic ending. Murphy’s nifty ideas might be enough to sustain the plot for some readers, but few will come away wholly satisfied. –Publisher’s Weekly

Math-Fi and Magic and History and Myth, all wrapped up in a fun (possibly urban fantasy-style) adventure!

This is the first-person narrative of Severian, a lowly apprentice torturer blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future Urth, and who–as revealed near the beginning–eventually becomes his land’s sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it’s a colorful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters, and mysteries to be solved. … For lovers of literary allusions, they are plenty here: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges, and familiar fables changed by eons of retelling… The Book of the New Sun is almost heartbreakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe’s masterpiece. –David Langford

Despite reading this book in isolation from its series — which means that we are looking at all the set-up and none of the payoff — we find a lot to discuss and a lot to love in this classic novel.

At once more human and more mythic than his Perelandra trilogy, Lewis’s short novel of love, faith, and transformation (both good and ill) offers the reader much food for thought in a compact, impressively rich story. Less heavy-handedly Christian-allegorical than Narnia, Till We Have Faces gives us characters who remind us of people we know facing choices and difficulties we recognize. This deceptively simple book takes on new depth with each rereading.

We strongly recommend that you read this one for yourselves; we had rather divergent readings of it just between the two of us, and we’re already tempted to revisit this discussion later, possibly with a scholar in tow. There is no doubt that this is a complex and complicated story that will reward your attention.

One moment a man sits on a suburban hill, gazing curiously at the stars. The next, he is whirling through the firmament, and perhaps the most remarkable of all science fiction journeys has begun. Even Stapledon’s other great work, LAST AND FIRST MEN, pales in ambition next to STAR MAKER, which presents nothing less than an entire imagined history of life in the universe, encompassing billions of years.

This relatively short novel is jam-packed with all the sense of wonder you could ask for. We talk about the seeds of any number of sf stories found within its pages, its perspective on aliens, the Omega Point, and much more. If you read Star Maker and enjoy it, we strongly recommend that you also read Last and First Men, Stapledon’s earlier work of science fiction.

In this episode of SF Crossing the Gulf, we enthuse about Jagannath, the award-winning collection from Karin Tidbeck.

We highly recommend this collection, an exemplar of the New Weird (although we never use that term in the podcast). Fantasy, fae, sf, and steampunk all collide in this amazing new collection.

• Karin Tidbeck’s blog
• “Who is Arvid Pekon” short film

Welcome back for Season 2, Part 1 of SF Crossing the Gulf!

Here’s our notional reading list for the coming season:

• Children of God, Mary Doria Russell
• Jagannath, Karin Tidbeck
• Starmaker, Olaf Stapledon
• Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis
• Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe
• Napier’s Bones, Derryl Murphy
• Selected short fiction of Cordwainer Smith [TBD]
• Flatland, Edwin Abbott
• Distances, Vandana Singh
• “Single Bit Error”, Ken Liu

With all rights reserved to change our minds, of course. And if you’re just joining us: SPOILER ALERT! We want to discuss these books in detail, and we can’t do that if we’re pretending that no one knows the ending.

We’ll almost certainly be back next year with another season–we’ve had too much fun not too! And maybe next time we’ll set-up a honest-to-goodness iTunes feed to go with it. If that’s something you’d be interested in, or if you have suggestions for some story or author you’d like us to read, please let us know in the comments here! Or via email or twitter. Thanks so much for listening!

Links:

• Curdella Forbes on Facebook
• Karen Burnham on Twitter
• Karen Lord on Twitter

Next episode we’ll be back with a rambling conversation wrapping up our first ‘season’ of podcasting.