A Meal of Thorns

By The Ancillary Review of BooksArts Books Fiction Science Fiction

A Meal of Thorns episodes

June 01A Meal of Thorns 51- THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS with Premee Mohamed
Science fiction readers love a mechanism, they love a bit of world-building and mystery-solving. Premee Mohamed joins us to discuss Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a book that asks: what if a science fiction book intentionally avoided all of that?
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Premee Mohamed
Title: The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Mercutio by Kate Heartfield
Pretenders to the Throne of God by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Orbit 10 anthology edited by Damon Knight
William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say” and its many responses
Premee’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight
Meander, Spiral, Explode by Jane Alison
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon
Heart of Darkness by Josef Conrad
The Vorrh by B. Catling
The face dancers from Frank Herbert’s Dune series
Mystique and the Kree from the Marvel/X-Men comics
Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide
Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire
Premee’s The Butcher of the Forest & Wickhills
"sentients" & "sapients"
“The Great Chain of Being”
Star Wars series The Bad Batch and The Clone Wars
Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead
Octavia Butler's Dawn
Tolkien's On Fairy Stories
Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? & Ridley Scott's Bladerunner
Premee’s The Siege of Burning Grass
Hilary Putnam's “Twin Earth”
Premee's Patreon, Website, Bluesky
Wickhills & From the Library of Jurgen Leitner
The Carl Brandon Society
1 hr 6 min
May 18A Meal of Thorns 50- SISYPHEAN with Gareth Watkins
A rain of corpses is falling from the sky, insectoid femme fatales are setting their compound eyes on our tender thoraxes, and our cattle drive across an expanse of nanotech goo is starting to go off the rails. So we ask ourselves: do we still have to go to work tomorrow? Critic, author, & podcaster Gareth Watkins joins to discuss Dempow Torishima’s delightfully strange Sisyphean.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Gareth Watkins
Title: Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima, translated by Daniel Huddleston
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Death // Sentence
Muskism by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff
Peter Thiel
One Piece by Eiichiro Oda
Slavoj Žižek
René Girard
Carl Schmitt
Thiel/Douthat NYT interview
Jeff VanderMeer
Haikosoru
Viz Comics
Battle Royale by Koushun Takami
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
The Doloriad by Missouri Williams
M. John Harrison’s essay on worldbuilding
Marmite/Vegemite
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel
"Professor Jiang"
Isaac Asimov's Foundation
New Chronology
Tartarianism
Franz Kafka & Philip K. Dick
A Scanner Darkly
H.R. Giger
Phil Tippet’s Mad God
Kameron Hurley's The Stars are Legion
Antoine Volodine's Radiant Terminus
Manuela Draeger's Kree
Mike Judge’s Office Space
David Cronenberg
Raymond Chandler
Antonio Gramsci
Nick Land
Friedrich Nietzsche's eternal recurrence
Yoss's Planet for Rent
Deleuze & Guitarri
The Sex Pistols & Avril Lavigne
H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu"
Ayn Rand
Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts
Torishima's Kanadete no Nufuretsun
Gareth's bluesky
Just Plain Evil: Cruelty, Extinction, and the Authoritarian Mind
Gareth's appearances on Blood Work
1 hr 12 min
May 04A Meal of Thorns 49- MOONGATHER with Molly Templeton
Stop explaining and start exploring: critic & reviewer Molly Templeton walks us through this gem of 1980s mass market fantasy, with many asides and theories on shifting patterns of publishing and reading patterns. Plus, we spill the beans on the most fun book club, also known as the most fun cult.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Molly Templeton
Title: Moongather by Jo Clayton
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
ARB’s Fundraiser! Donations & shares greatly appreciated!
Kurt Vonnegut's asterisk
John Darnielle's This Year
"Cold Milk Bottle"
"First Few Desperate Hours"
Claire North's Slow Gods
Hebe Stanton’s review at ARB
Molly’s discussion of Slow Gods and being stuck on a book
Gary Wolfe & Jonathan Strahan's Coode Street Podcast
Arkady Martine & Ann Leckie
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Violet Allen's Prism, Plastic, Void
Little Puss Press
Casey Plett
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose The Time War
Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall
A.V. Marraccini’s We The Parasites
Clayton’s Diadem from the Stars
Brandon Sanderson
Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea
Forgotten Realms
J.R.R. Tolkien's “On Fairy Stories” & Lord of the Rings
Ged & the otak from Earthsea
"Fridging" & "Bury Your Gays"
The Arrowverse TV shows
Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Film
"Explaining vs Exploring"
Bora Chung's Midnight Timetable
The Toyota Tercel
The soot-sprites from Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner
Bethany Jacobs’ This Brutal Moon, conclusion to The Kindom Trilogy
Jacobs’ website
Philip Pullman's The Rose Field
The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey
David Eddings’ The Belgariad
Parallel Worlds Bookshop
Cherryh's Rusalka & The Paladin
The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation & Prize
Molly's writing at Reactor & Bluesky & Website
1 hr 5 min
April 20A Meal of Thorns 48- READY PLAYER ONE with Matthew Leggatt
The pleasures and perils of nostalgia & reference, the importance of identifying real play versus gamified labor, and whether the internet used to be fun: Matthew Leggat of the Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast joins to discuss Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Matthew Leggatt
Title: Ready Player One by Ernie Cline
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
ARB’s Fundraiser!!!
Matthew’s Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror, Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, and Wastelands and Wonderlands
The Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
Chicano Frankenstein by Daniel A. Olivas
U&DF episode with Olivas
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash & Reamde
William Gibson’s Neuromancer
K.A. Teryna’s Black Hole Heart translated by Alex Shvartsman
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya’s Chain Gang All-Stars
Was It Yesterday: Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television edited by Matthew
Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
Gamergate
“Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel, and the Geeky ‘Canon’ of White Masculinity” by Megan Amber Condis
Captain Crunch: phreaker John Draper
Kyle Chayka’s "Why the internet isn't fun anymore"
William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”
Ling Ma's Severance
Helen MacDonald & Syn Blaché’s Prophet
MacDonald’s H is for Hawk
Stanislaw Lem's Solaris
Alice Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture
The television series Stranger Things
Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life
Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (based on Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!) & Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two
Voight-Kampf Test from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner / Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The "lusory attitude" from Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia
Ernst Callenbach's Ecotopia
Philip Nel’s “I Love the ‘80s: Dystopia, Nostalgia, and Ready Player One”
Michael Jackson
372 Pages We'll Never Get Back
(That's Mike Nelson of MST3K Fame)
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Jordan Carroll's Speculative Whiteness
Paul Hardisty'sForcing trilogy
1 hr 11 min
April 06A Meal of Thorns 47- CLOUD ATLAS with Abigail Nussbaum
A nested novel that very pointedly bridges the litfic/specfic divide, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas takes some big swings at tricky topics. Abigail Nussbaum returns to the podcast with some thoughts on how the novel has aged, and how it’s still relevant to genre thinking today.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Abigail Nussbaum
Title: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
ARB’s Fundraiser!!!
Track Changes
Aliya Whiteley’s The Misheard World & Abigail’s review
Nina Allen
Alexis Hall's Hell's Heart
Olivia Waite
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
Lincoln Michel's Metallic Realms
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees
Readerville forum & Salon Magazine's “The Well”
The Cloud Atlas by Liam Callanan
Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape & Motherless Brooklyn
Kate Atkinson's Case Histories
Our episode on The Historian
Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
New Wave, Cyberpunk, Mundane SF, The New Weird
China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station
The “New Adult” category of books
Taylor Jenkins Reed
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
The Marvel Cinematic Universe
Aragorn’s Tax Policy
Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
Jean Baudrillard
William Gibson
The Stanford marshmallow experiment
The Chatham Islands, Moriori & Māori peoples
Charlie Jane Anders’ piece on Cloud Atlas
The Velvet Underground joke (not many people listened, but everybody who did started a band)
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Niall Harrison’s “In Search of Green Overshoots”
The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
Abigail's Blog & Bluesky
Tolkien Series: Roseanna Pendlebury & Ed Morland’s, Ranged Touch’s Shelved by Genre, Nick Hubble, Jared Pechaček, Weird Studies
1 hr 11 min
March 23A Meal of Thorns 46- THE BIG SLEEP with Max Gladstone
We’re leaving speculative genres for just a moment! Author Max Gladstone joins to discuss style & structure in Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled classic The Big Sleep, a work that’s been massively influential across SFF literature, games, & film.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Max Gladstone
Title: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Additional music from David Hilowitz’s “Future Cities”, CC BY-NC 4.0
And a couple of seconds from the end of The Mountain Goats’ “Cadaver Sniffing Dog”
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Nominate for the Hugos!
Nominate for the Le Guin Prize!
Support Locus Magazine’s Fundraiser!
ARB Kickstarter coming soon!
Stranger Things
Metro City by Kurt Busiec et al.
Sex Criminals by Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky
Kieron Gillan
Balsam Karam's Event Horizon
John Darnielle's This Year
Song Exploder episode on the Mountain Goats song “Cadaver Sniffing Dog”
'Pataphysics
Waigong & neigong
Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”
Dorothy Parker
William Gibson
L.A. Confidential, dir. Curtis Hanson
Tracer Bullet in Bill Waterson’s Calvin & Hobbes
Snoopy in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts
Dashiel Hammett
Haruki Murakami'sHard-Boiled Wonderland & The End of the World
Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light & The Dead Man's Brother
The Raymond Chandler Papers, edited by Tom Hiney & Frank McShane
James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity
Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder”
Max Payne, directed by Petri Järvilehto & written by Sam Lake
Albert Camus & Jean-Paul Sartre
Robert A. Heinlein
Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun
Hammet's The Maltese Falcon
Chandler’s The Long Goodbye
Fix-ups & “cannibal novels”
William Faulkner & Leigh Bracket
To Have and To Have Not, directed by Howard Hawks
Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall
Chandler’s The High Window
Rex Stour's Nero Wolfe stories, such as Black Orchids
“The CSI effect”
Jeffrey Rowland's “Science Cop” bit in Wigu
David Lynch
Paul Aster
Peter Brooks' Reading for the Plot
Dead Hand Rule, the latest Craft novel (one more to come!)
Max's website & newsletter
1 hr 2 min
March 09A Meal of Thorns 45- THE DEEP SEA DIVER’S SYNDROME with Alexander Dickow
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
1 hr 4 min
February 23A Meal of Thorns 44- PALADIN OF SOULS with Liz Bourke
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
1 hr 9 min
February 09A Meal of Thorns 43- DIASPORA with Eden Kupermintz
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
1 hr 14 min
January 26A Meal of Thorns 42- IMARO with Jon Tattrie
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
1 hr 8 min

About A Meal of Thorns

From the publisher's feed

A critical book club from the Ancillary Review of Books. Host Jake Casella Brookins invites writers, scholars, and critics to discuss thorny works of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative…