A Meal of Thorns

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Marita Arvaniti
• Title: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• A Meal of Thorns and the Ancillary Review of Books are Hugo finalists! We are delighted and honored; a big congratulations to all the finalists.
• Dianna Wynne Jones, Greer Gilman, Elizabeth Bear
• Dianna Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock
• Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love
• Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin
• Terri Windling & Ellen Datlow edited fairytale collections
• Robin Hobb’s Mad Ship
• Patrick O'Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books
• Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots
• Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption
• E.R. Eddison
• Laurie J. Marks’ Elemental Logic series
• Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale
• Euripedes' The Bacchae
• Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy
• Michael Swanwick’s Hope in the Mist
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings
• C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically Prince Caspian
• Robert Luketic’s Legally Blonde
• Edgar Allen Poe, Julio Cortázar, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore
• Anne Carson’s translation of Bakkhai
• Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market
• Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
• N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
• Sofia Samatar's Olondrian novels
• Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes
• Naomi Mitchison’s To the Chapel Perilous and Memoirs of a Spacewoman
• T.H. White, Tanith Lee
• Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer
• Jo Walton’s Among Others
• Kat Howard’s Roses and Rot
• Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon
• Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife
• Guardian Article on romantasy
• Copyright romantasy case
• Sarah J. Maas
• Jacqueline Carey Kushiel's Dart
• Nicholas Stuart Gray’s Seven Swans
• Marita’s Instagram

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Archita Mittra
• Title: Among Others by Jo Walton
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Eliza Chan’s Fathomfolk & Archita’s review
• Sue Lynn Tan's Immortal
• Lavanya Lakshminarayan's Interstellar Megachef & The Ten Percent Thief
• Michael Nieva's Dengue Boy
• Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide
• Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven
• Ernest Cline's Ready Player One
• Stranger Things
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
• Jame Tiptree, Jr.
• Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17
• List of books mentioned in Among Others
• Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles
• C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia
• Le Guin’s “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” from The Language of the Night
• Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat's Cradle
• Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Delany’s Trouble on Triton
• Walton’s Informal History of the Hugos
• C.J. Cherryh's Gate of Ivrel
• Archita's reviews @ Strange Horizons & Locus
• Archita on Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram
• Archita's Locus year-end
• Casella’s Locus year-end
• Jared Pechaček's The West Passage, Casella's review, and of course Jared's A Meal of Thorns episode on E.R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistress

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Dan Hartland
• Title: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Gautam Bhatia's The Sentence
• Alex Pheby's Waterblack
• Cristina Rivera Garza's The Taiga Syndrome
• Katherine Addison's The Tomb of Dragons
• Elizabeth Sandifer's Hugboxing vs Scabpicking
• David Brin
• The Wilhelm Scream
• Jack London's The Call of the Wild
• Brandon Taylor’s “against casting tape fiction”
• The idea of “novelization style” as discussed in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace
• I saw your black chanel boots mr skywalker
• Timothy Zahn’s Cascade Point
• Diane Carey's Ghost Ship
• Winamp skins
• Michael P. Kube-McDowell’s Black Fleet Crisis trilogy
• Vonda N. McIntyre's The Crystal Star
• Una McCormack
• Kevin J. Anderson
• Michael A. Stackpole’s I, Jedi
• Dresden Codak
• Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312
• Andor
• Dr. Who "New Adventures" novels
• Ahsoka, Rebels
• Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye
• Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina and Tales from Jabba's Palace
• Strange Horizons Criticism Special Issue & Tansy Gardam's article on Jackson’s LOTR films
• The Going Rogue episode on The Star Wars Holiday Special

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Eden Kupermintz
• Title: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• anarchySF, heavy blog is heavy, Eden’s work at ARB, the Death // Sentence podcast
• Alex Pheby’s Waterblack
• Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds
• Darkly Lem’s Transmentation Transience
• Death // Sentence episode on Unknown Language
• The Dragonlance series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (and others)
• Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone’s This Is How You Lose The Time War
• Jeff Noon & Steve Beard’s Gogmagog & Ludluda
• The Going Rogue podcast
• Tolkien’s The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island
• Ben Berman Ghan’s The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits & Eden's review
• The Kalevala, The Mabinogion, the Matter of Britain
• The Folio Society
• Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun
• Octavia Butler’s Kindred
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
• Siegfried & the Dragon
• Kate Wagner on Wagner’s (no relation) The Ring
• Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage
• The By-The-Bywater podcast
• E.R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses, and our episode on that with Jared Pechaček
• The Tea With Tolkien podcast
• John Milton’s Paradise Lost
• Eden’s Death // Sentence episode on one page of the Akallabêth
• Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas
• M. John Harrison, worldbuilding as the “clomping foot of nerdism”
• Anthony Burgess’s (and probably Stanley Kubrick’s tbf) A Clockwork Orange
• Blind Guardian's Nightfall in Middle-Earth and “The Bard's Song”
• The Hobbit (1977) Dopesmoker Edition
• For a concise overview of some of the conservative/fascist love affair with Tolkien, see Robert T. Tally Jr.’s “Tolkien’s Deplorable Cultus”.
• Jason Guriel’s Forgotten Work
• Eden’s Bluesky

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Benjamin Rosenbaum
• Title: Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Ben’s novel, The Unraveling, and latest game, The Ghost & The Golem
• The Mohanraj & Rosenbaum Are Humans podcast
• GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot
• Kelly Link’s The Book of Love
• Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice & sequels
• Evan Dahm's The Last Delivery & Harrowing of Hell
• Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings (who also illustrated the Elemental Logic covers)
• Myers-Briggs personality test
• Orson Scott Card’s The Tales of Alvin Maker
• Avery Alder on queer game mechanics
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution”
• George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire
• Small Beer Press
• Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories
• Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant
• A Meal of Thorns 07 – THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT with Amal El-Mohtar
• Nelson Mandela wearing the Sprinbok jersey
• Davids Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything
• Le Guin’s Five Ways to Forgiveness
• Isaac Asimov’s Foundation
• John W. Campbell & Joseph Campbell
• Maimonides & Saladin
• Coffee & the “Europe Sobered Up” theory
• Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Yentl” & adaptations

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Hilary Strang
• Title: Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Marooned on Mars, a podcast about the works of KSR
• Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
• Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts
• KSR’s Mars trilogy
• Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future
• John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
• Wiscon
• “The Hard Problem” audio project adaptation of a section of Aurora, created with Marina Abramović’s workshop, mixed/composed by Adam Tinkle, with the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Human Imagination at the University of California San Diego.
• Much of the web-available multimedia about this project is lost to time and linkrot, unfortunately, but there’s a very nice write-up at this fan-run KSR site.
• You can still find a YouTube version of the audio here.
• As mentioned in the show credits, the “Into the Impossible” podcast later developed into something very different, platforming far-right whackjobs, climate deniers, TESCREALists, that kind of thing, along with lots of presumably credible scientists, so: be warned. I’m not clear on how the early “Into the Impossible” podcasts with the Clarke Centre transitioned to the later, longer-running show with Brian Keating; just don’t want to accidentally contribute to any of you going down a brain-worm-inducing YouTube/podcast-algo spiral.
• Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids
• Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”
• “Wherever you go, there you are.”
• KSR’s 2312 and New York 2140
• Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
• Theodore McComb’s Uranians
• Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun
• Stephen H. Dole’s Habitable Planets for Man
• Tracked it down: the "drop unconscious humans off on a grid to check habitability" thing is from Charlie Stross’s excellent blog.
• C.J. Cherryh’s Heavy Time
• "Enough is as good as a feast."
• Le Guin’s “Mrs. Brown Test” is from “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” in The Languages of the Night
• KSR’s Science in the Capital Trilogy, re-released as Green Earth
• "Science Fiction is the Realism of Our Times"
• "True Voyage Is Return"
• The Alien films
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Jared Pechaček
• Title: Mistress of Mistresses by E.R. Eddison
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Jared’s book, The West Passage
• By-the-Bywater, a podcast about Tolkien
• Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche
• Caroline Hagood’s Death And Other Speculative Fictions
• Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros
• The Inklings
• Barbara Remington, artist and illustrator. Hard to find good scans of her works; here’s a page with the Eddison covers.
• Anna Vaninskaya’s Fantasies of Time and Death
• Lord Dunsany
• Griemas Squares
• C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, we did an episode on that!
• Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison
• C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces
• Sappho
• John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi & The White Devil
• Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman”
• Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
• John Crowley’s Aegypt
• Baruch Spinoza
• Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus
• Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of “The Will to Power”
• Godspeed! You Black Emperor’s “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven”
• William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
• Hope Mirlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist
• Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide
• Jared's Bluesky, Instagram, Tumblr

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Roseanna Pendlebury
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

In Memoriam:

Alan Jeffrey & Cameron Estrich-Watson

References:

• Tor’s The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century
• Jo Walton’s commentary on putting together those lists
• Adam Roberts, Greg Egan
• Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor
• Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel's Dart
• Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant
• C.J. Cherryh’s Rimrunners
• Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story
• Carl Sagan’s Contact
• William Goldman’s The Princess Bride
• Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension
• Samantha Harvey’s Orbital
• William Gibson’s Neuromancer
• Indra Das’s The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar
• Bruce Coville- Aliens Ate My Homework & Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher
• Robin Sloan- Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Sourdough, Moonbound
• Nerds of a Feather
• Worldcon
• Centre for Fantasy and Fantastic at the University of Glasgow
• Christopher Priest & Nina Allan
• Adrian Tchaikovsky’s City of Last Chances, House of Open Wounds, Days of Shattered Faith
• Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
• The New Weird
• Readercon
• Emily Tesh’s acceptance speech
• World Fantasy Convention
• Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Eastercon
• Octothorpe
• Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors
• Science Fiction Awards Database
• Marisa Crane’s I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself
• Martha Wells’ Murderbot series
• Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song
• Shehan Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
• Molly Templeton’s “The Joy of Reading Books You Don’t Entirely Understand”
• Colson Whitehead, Marlon James
• Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory
• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All-Stars
• Wole Talabi’s Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon
• Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods No Monsters & We Are The Crisis
• S.L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws
• Moniquill Blackgoose’s To Shape a Dragon's Breath
• Alissa Hatman’s Sift
• Sarah Cypher’s The Skin and Its Girl
• Isabel Waidner’s Corey Fah Does Social Mobility
• Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Library of Broken Worlds
• Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality
• Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall
• august clarke’s Metal from Heaven
• Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage
• Emet North’s In Universes
• Johannes Anyuru’s Ixelles
• Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time
• Madeline L'Engle
• Premee Mohamed- The Siege of Burning Grass, The Butcher of the Forest, & The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man’s Wife
• Seth Dickinson’s Exordia
• Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
• Neon Hemlock
• Alex Jeffer’s A Mourning Coat
• Luna Press
• Lorraine Wilson’s The Last to Drown
• Greg Egan’s Morphotropic
• Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume
• Abigail Nussbaum’s Track Changes
• Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness
• Camestros Felapton’s Debarkle
• Positron 2020 Report
• Cleveland Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Typebar
• Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide
• Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent
• Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots
• Katherine Addison’s The Tomb of Dragons
• R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis
• Natalia Theodoridou’s Sour Cherry
• Yoon Ha Lee’s Code & Codex
• Oliver K. Langmead & Aliya Whiteley’s City of All Seasons
• New David Mitchell?
• Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms
• Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe Is Buried
• Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season
• Leena Krow’s Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids
• Amplitudes, edited by Lee Mandelo
• Science Fiction Research Association
• Premee Mohamed, One Message Remains
• Stephen King writing
• Roseanna’s “Small Press Dispatch” column at ARB

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Anna McFarlane
• Title: The This by Adam Roberts
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Anna's books, including Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology, The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, and Adam Roberts: Critical Essays
• Mary Butts’ “Mappa Mundi”
• Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness
• Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself, Lake of Darkness, New Model Army, and nonfiction
• Christopher Priest
• The Thing, dir. John Carpenter
• Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
• Deleuze’s concept of The Fold
• Nabokov’s Pale Fire
• Michael Swanwick Stations of the Tide & Vacuum Flowers
• Cory Doctorow & Greg Egan
• Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash
• William Gibson’s Neuromancer
• Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This
• Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers
• Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War
• Star Trek’s Borg
• E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”
• George Orwell’s 1984
• Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit
• "The sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel"
• The idea of the pharmakon
• The Big Read podcast on The This
• Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex
• Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation
• Robot monkey/wiremother experiments
• Roberts’s review of The Book of Elsewhere
• Roberts on Bluesky
• Black Mirror
• Thomas Disch’s 334 & Camp Concentration
• David Lynch
• Peter Watts’ Blindsight & Echopraxia
• Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, & Galapagos
• Vonnegut thing about delivering a letter
• Vonnegut’s “Biafra: A People Betrayed”
• Fix-up novels
• Jo Walton's “On Selecting the Top Ten Genre Books of the First Quarter of the Century”
• Casella's essay on This Is How You Lose the Time War
• Lavie Tidhar's Central Station, The Circumference of the World, Osama, A Man Lies Dreaming
• A line from Hegel to Marx to Darko Suvin
• The conclusion to Walter Pater's The Renaissance
• Molly Templeton’s “A Modest Request for a Little More Genre Chaos”
• Young Frankenstein dir. Mel Brooks
• Anna on Bluesky
• The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Jon Greenaway
• Title: Melmoth by Sarah Perry
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Jon's latest books: Capitalism: A Horror Story and A Primer On Utopian Philosophy
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory
• Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo
• Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives
• Napoleon Dynamite, dir. Jared Hess
• Carmen Maria Machado, George Saunders
• Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids
• Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer
• Perry’s The Essex Serpent and Enlightenment
• Perry’s essay on writing while in pain/on painkillers
• Goethe’s Faust, Dante’s Inferno, the myth of the Wandering Jew
• Matthew Lewis’s The Monk
• Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
• China Mieville's idea of anti-fantasy
• Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
• “participatory anthropology”
• Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
• Wagner’s Parsifal
• God's Not Dead, dir. Harold Cronk
• Heidegger's idea of thrownness (Geworfenheit)
• Philosophical theories of “the gift” and “impossible exchange”
• Christopher Priest’s The Prestige
• Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five
• Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall and The Saint of Bright Doors
• Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass
• Horror Vanguard
• Jon’s Blog & Substack