A Meal of Thorns

By The Ancillary Review of BooksArts Books Fiction Science Fiction

A Meal of Thorns episodes

October 19A Meal of Thorns 61- REVENANT GUN with Alexandra Pierce
"I don't know what planet they're on, but I know about the earrings!” We’ve got a very unusual space opera to read through this time around, one that takes questions of empire and identity to interesting places; critic and editor Alexandra Pierce joins to discuss.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Alexandra Pierce
Title: Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
2026 Le Guin Prize Shortlist episode with Roseanna Pendlebury
Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell
The Crawford, Ignyte, and British Fantasy awards
Ian Mond’s episode on Tiny Deaths
Wickhills by Premee Mohamed
Behind the Gate by Amparo Dávila, translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson
Ninefox Gambit & The Raven Stratagem
Skyrim & Baldur's Gate 3
C.J. Cherryh, Vernor Vinge, David Brin
Cherryh’s The Faded Sun
The New Weid & Grimdark
Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books
Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire
Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant
Terry Pratchett's Discworld
Martha Well’s Murderbot
Jeph Jacques’ Questionable Content
Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor
Karl Ove Knausgård
Star Wars
Ursula Le Guin’s “The One Who Walk Away from Omelas” & The Dispossessed
Orson Scott Card’s Ender's Game
Frank Herbert’s Dune
Yoon Ha Lee's new book, Code & Codex, & Alexandra's review
Greg Egan
Speculative Insight
1 hr 2 min
October 05A Meal of Thorns 60- 2026 UKLG List with Roseanna Pendlebury
Only in its 5th year of operation, the Le Guin Fiction prize has already become something of a critical darling, with very interesting shortlists and winners that rarely overlap with other genre awards. Critic and reviewer Roseanna Pendlebury returns to the podcast to share opinions and insights on the nine books on this year’s list.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Roseanna Pendlebury
Titles: The Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize Shortlist, 2026
Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House Press)
Sunward by William Alexander (Saga Press)
Call and Response by Christopher Caldwell (Neon Hemlock)
Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur (Algonquin)
The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tor Books)
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books)
Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta (DAW Books)
One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)
Slow Gods by Claire North (Orbit)
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
C.J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel
Eastercon
Toshiyuki Kusakihara’s Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave
LA Worldcon
Hugo Awards
Clarke Awards
Otherwise Awards
Olga Ravn's The Employees (AMOT episode)
Stanislaw Lem
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
Iain M. Banks
…as opposed to Banksy
Niall Harrison
Ann Leckie
Paradox’s Stellaris
Becky Chambers
Martha Wells' Murderbot series
“squeecore”, originally proposed on the Rite Gud podcast; elaborated a bit in Simon McNeil’s “Notes on Squeecore”
Elizabeth Sandifer’s idea of "torwave"
T. Kingfisher's Astarion (and bizarre discourse thereon)
Phobos
Sarah Palin
Arturo Serrano
Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater
Oliver Langmead
AMOT’s First Episode with Dan Hartland
China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy
Alex Pheby’s Cities of the Weft
K.J. Bishops’s The Etched City
Rebecca Roanhorse
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (AMOT episode)
Elwin Cotman’s work, eg Weird Black Girls
Le Guin’s Changing Planes
In Your Spare Time, a podcast where various people read entries from Le Guin’s blog
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass
Sarah Mueller's The Bone Orchards
Ursula Whitcher's North Continent Ribbon
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Tyrant Philosophers
Le Guin’s Four/Five Ways to Forgiveness & The Word for World Is Forest
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Gene Wolfe & Harlan Ellison
Colson Whitehead & Marlon James
Le Guin (and Virginia Woolf), “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown”
Frodo & Sam from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
Roseanna & Casella’s AMOT discussion of Fellman’s Dead Collections
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
The Mulai by Munir Hachemi, translated by Julia Sanches
Fitzcarraldo office shoot
Nerds of a Feather
Small Press Dispatch series at ARB
Roseanna's blog & bluesky
Roseanna & Dan Hartland discussing the Clarke shortlist at NoAF
1 hr 55 min
September 21A Meal of Thorns 59- OF ONE BLOOD with Garrett Bridger Gimore
Out of print for the greater part of the 20th century, Hopkins’ Of One Blood looks a lot like Afro-futurism, using ancient Ethiopian technology and the new science of mesmerism to think about racial politics. But it’s actually a bit stranger than that—Garret Bridger Gilmore returns to walk us through some of the novel’s contexts and theories.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Garret Bridger Gilmore
Title: Of One Blood, or, The Hidden Self by Pauline E. Hopkins
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré
The Fog by James Herbert
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D. G. Compton
J.G. Ballard
Japan Sinks by Sakyo Komatsu, translated by Michael Gallagher
Plessy V. Ferguson
Mesmerism, Vitalism, Magnetism
H.G. Wells
William James
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Martin Delany
Black Panther
Hazel V. Carby's edited collection of Hopkins' Work
Deborah E. McDowell
MIT Radium Age series
Minister Faust
George S. Schuyler's Black Empire
Marcus Garvey
H. Rider Haggard's She
Geoffrey Sanborn's "The Pleasure of Its Company: Of One Blood and the Potentials of Plagiarism"
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Our Stand On Zanzibar Episode
W.E.B. DuBois & double consciousness
Mississippi Quarterly article on race in the Southern Reach trilogy
Cora Jean Moten’s “The Creeping Thing”
1 hr 8 min
September 07A Meal of Thorns 58- LACON V
Worldcon episode time: we’ve got interviews, we’ve got a coffee report, we’ve got an only-mildly chaotic group podcast attempt!
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guests & Collaborators:
Thomas Ha
Alex Kingsley
Frauke Uhlenbruch
Marshall Ryan Maresca & Cass Morris of Worldbuilding for Masochists
Kevin Anderson & Lori Anderson of Hugo, Girl!
John Coxon of Octothorpe
Helen Montgomery
Sam Kim of Kumquat
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Additional sounds & music:
The Los Angeles Metro
“Surf Shimmy” by Kevin Macleod
“Through the Woods We Ran” by Vindsvept
And the cool theremin sounds Kevin made for Hugo, Girl!
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Thomas Ha’s Uncertain Sons
The Best of Jeffrey Ford and Pandemonium Waltz
Steve Rasnic Tem & Brian Evenson
Michel Siffre, French cave-and-sleep explorer
J.S. Fields
Zoe Franznick
DePaul Pop Culture Conference
Sabrina Mittermeier: The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek and Fighting For The Future
Alien vs. Predator, Hellraiser, Dogma
The Bible in Motion, edited by Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch
Memory Alpha
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park
Chuck, Earth: Final Conflict, Scavengers Reign, Battleship
The Speculative Literature Foundation and their Deep Dish reading series
HWA (Horror Writers Association)
Playground Chicago
Strong Branch
SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association)
Goblin Market
Mary Robinette Kowal, Curtis Chen
Alexy on Bluesky & Instagram
Space Wizard publishing
Loquat coffee
Artist Devon Sinead
Arboretum and Botanical Garden at Cal State Fullerton
E.G. Condé
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
Uketsu’s Strange Houses, Strange Pictures,Strange Buildings, translated by Jim Rion
Jo Walton
Lightspeed and Reactor
Alasdair Stuart & Marguerite Kenner (of projects like The Full Lid and Escape Artists)
Liza Groen Trombi of Locus Magazine
Cube
Gene Wolfe
The Prestige by Christopher Priest
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Green Marsby Kim Stanley Robinson
Widow’s Bay
Fonda Lee, Shannon Chakraborty, Gabriella Buba
SFF Addicts
Robert Shearman’s Tiny Deaths, Ian Mond’s pick for a recent episode
Nerds of a Feather
1 hr 6 min
August 24A Meal of Thorns 57- THE WATER STATUES with Langdon Hickman
A deeply strange and arresting short novel, The Water Statues defies easy categorization but has a powerful and cerebral atmosphere, putting us in mind of a lot of other works—including Clarke’s Piranesi. Langdon Hickman, last unshriven host of Death // Sentence, joins to discuss.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Langdon Hickman
Title: The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhedeff
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Recent episodes with other Death // Sentence hosts (Sisyphean with Gareth Watkins & Diaspora with Eden Kupermintz)
Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume
Roberto Bolaño
W.G. Sebald'sAusterlitz & The Rings of Saturn
Hugo Nominees, UKLG Nominees
Frank Herbert’s Dune
Holism vs reductivist materialism
Object oriented ontology & speculative realists
Nick Land, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton
Set theory
Jacques Derrida on “logos”
Greg Egan's Incandescence & related stories
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen
Kim Stanley Robin’s Aurora (AMOT episode w/ Hilary Strang)
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy of Djinn and Miskatonic
M.R. James
Eugene Thacker’s An Ideal For Living
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi(AMOT episode w/Misha Grifka Wander) & Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Hemingway’s “Iceberg theory”
Lydia Davis, Samuel Beckett
Decadent & Aesthetic movements
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner
Negative Capability
Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 1818
Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sofia Samatar
David Michell’s Cloud Atlas (AMOT episode with Abigail Nussbaum)
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”
Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
Hilary Putnam
The Caretaker by Doon Arbus
Death // Sentence
Treble Zine
Consequence of Sound
Langdon's newsletter
1 hr 5 min
August 10A Meal of Thorns 56- KILLER, COME BACK TO ME with Aigner Loren Wilson
More famous for his science fiction and dark fantasy, Ray Bradbury also tried his hand at crime fiction, with often-fascinating results. Writer, critic, and editor Aigner Loren Wilson talks us through the strange flourishes and tonal experiments of Killer, Come Back To Me!
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Aigner Loren Wilson
Title: Killer, Come Back To Me by Ray Bradbury
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
The Possession of Alba Díaz & Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues
The Ship of Death by Kyle Winkler
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud
Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction by Jonathan R. Eller & William F. Touponce
Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett
Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles
Damon Knight
"The Smallest Assassin"
Leigh Brackett
The Chucky franchise
Frank Miller’s Sin City, Shane Black’s The Nice Guys
Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures
"Dead Men Rise Up never"
"Where Everything Ends"
"The Town Where No One Got Off"
"The Utterly Perfect Murder"
The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller
"Punishment Without Crime"
"The Whole Town’s Sleeping" & "At Midnight in the Month of June"
"The Women" from I Sing the Body Electric
"And So Died Riabouchinska"
"The Smiling People"
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl"
"Some Live Like Lazarus"
Octavia E. Butler
Darker Times
Writing Skins, Aigner’s newsletter
Aigner's website
Scene Builder
1 hr 16 min
July 29A Meal of Thorns 55- Readercon & the PSRB
In this con-coverage episode, Casella talks to folks at Readercon in Boston, including Lisa from Narrated, author Sara S. Messenger, and editor Carl Engle-Laird. We also visit Porter Square Books, an indie bookstore that has recently launched their own book review.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Readercon
Porter Square Books
Lisa from the Narrated podcast
The Hugo Awards
Elizabeth Bear’s White Space series
C.J. Cherryh & Lois McMaster Bujold
Sara S. Messenger
“Jennifer’s Daughter” in Nightmare Magazine
“When We Loved Giants” in Lightspeed
Karel Čapek
Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist (good AMOT episode on that!)
AMOT episode on Ready Player One
Clark Seanor’s “Recycled Air: Wayfarers and the Tyranny of the Everyday” in Strange Horizons
Lovestruck Books in last year’s Readercon episode
Katherine @ Porter Square Books
K.A. Applegate’s Animorphsseries
Chuck Tingle
Ann Patchett’s Whistler
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
Roseanna Pendlebury’s review of Sour Cherry
Sunny Moraine (from our Pattern Recognition episode)
Will McMahon
Scott Edelman’s Eating the Fantastic podcast
Benjamin Rosenbaum (from our Fire Logic episode)
Carl Engle-Laird, editor at Tor
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
Jon Bois’ 17776
Cambridge Porchfest & the Good Trouble Brass Band
Gracenote & Broadsheet coffee
Thomas Wensma has an interview with Australian barista champ Jack Simpson & coffee farmer Juan Pablo Campos about the Ombligon cultivar at Perfect Daily Grind, if that caught your ear
Bujold’s Vorkosigan series & Barrayar
Josh Cook of Porter Square Books & the Porter Square Review of Books
PSB’s Bluesky
Josh’s articles at LitHub
Poly Barton’s What Am I, A Deer?
Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps & Acid Green Velvet
51 min
July 13A Meal of Thorns 54- SUNSHINE with Laura Zats
Literary agent and Print Run podcaster extraordinaire Laura Zats is on to talk about a novel that is the most urban fantasy you can imagine, and yet seems to run towards different traditions and ideas the closer you examine it—Robin McKinley’s award-winning but under-discussed Sunshine.

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Laura Zats
Title: Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Host: Jake Casella Brookins
Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork by Rob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Christopher Buehlman’s Blacktongue Thief & Between Two Fires
Peter Rock's Makeshift
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
Totally not the heist film Oceans 11
Newberry Honor & Mythopoeic Award
Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries/Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood series
Kim Harrison
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Twilight & Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series
Dunning-Kruger effect
McKinley's Deerskin
Editor Sharyn November & the Firebird imprint
Charles De Lint, Anne Rice, Anita Blake
"Contemporary Fantasy"
Stephen Graham Jones
Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires & Horrorstör
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla
Matt Kirkland’s “Dracula Daily”
RS Benedict’s “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny”
Lee Mandelo's The Woods All Black
Indra Das's The Devourers
John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids
The Print Run podcast
Erik Hane's “The Fandom Strain”
1 hr 11 min
June 29A Meal of Thorns 53- TINY DEATHS with Ian Mond
Critic & reviewer Ian Mond talks us through Tiny Deaths, a very funny and frequently morbid collection. We also think bigger: about the place and status of humor and seriousness in genre literature, and why non-genre imprints and translated literature might be places to look for this energy.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Ian Mond
Title: Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
The Writer and The Critic
Tayari Jones’ Kin
Boyhood by David Keenan
Centreouropa by Vicente Luis Mora, translated by Rahul Bery
Edward Royston’s Transgressing Time
Christopher Priest's The Recollections
Priest & Allan’s The Illuminated Man
Sturgeon's Law (“90% of everything is crap”)
Dr. Who & Stephen King
Gallifrey One convention
Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, T.C. Boyle, Kelly Link
Lisa Heschong’s Thermal Delight in Architecture
Rachel Khong’s My Dear You
The Simpsons
Blindness by José Saramago, Julio Cortázar
Shearman’s Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Everyone’s Just So So Special, and We All Hear Stories in the Dark
“Chimes At Midnight” and “The Holy Terror”
Douglas Adams
Machine of Death, edited by Ryan North
Jon Stone’s The Monster At The End Of This Book
Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria
Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis
James Morrow's Towing Jehovah & Only Begotten Daughter
Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”
Leyna Krow's Sinkhole and Other Stories
Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis
Michael Swanwick & Jeffrey Ford collections
"Gate 9" in Pandemonium Waltz
Hilary Leichter, Sayaka Murata, Liliana Colanzi
Translated Hugo Initiative
Words Without Borders
Locus Award for Best Translated Novel
Isaac Fellman's Notes From A Regicide
Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Sean McTiernan's SFUltra
Locus Magazine
Ian's Substack & Facebook & Goodreads
1 hr 17 min
June 15A Meal of Thorns 52- STAND ON ZANZIBAR with Dan Hartland
Brunner’s prescient classic about overpopulation: is it about overpopulation? Was it prescient? And, for that matter: what does it mean to be a classic? Reviewer and editor Dan Hartland joins to discuss these questions and more.
Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.
Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!
Guest: Dan Hartland
Title: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
Host:Jake Casella Brookins
Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
Artwork byRob Patterson
Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
References:
Strange Horizon’s 2026 fund-drive
Strange Horizons’ Critical Friends podcast
The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan
Prism, Plastic, Void by Violet Allen
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Max Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
We The Parasites by A.V. Marraccini
Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Trade of Blood, Mr. Shivers, and Divine Cities trilogy
Orion’s “SF Masterworks” series
Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination
Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War
The Club Of Rome’s report “The Limits to Growth”
Brunner’s “Club or Rome Quartet”: Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, Shockwave Rider, Jagged Orbit
John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
New Worlds magazine
"New Wave" science fiction
Timothy Leary
The Beatles’ Please Please Me versus Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Jad Smith’s John Brunner
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s The Sirens of Titan & Cat's Cradle
William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson
Thomas Disch's 334 & Camp Concentration
The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich & Anne Howland Ehrlich
Soylent Green, dir. Richard Fleischer
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic”
Vajra Chandrasekera
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Network, dir. Sidney Lumet
Marshall McLuhan
Taylor Sheridan & John Linson’s Yellowstone series
Transmetropolitan comic series by Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson et al.
Going Rogue podcast
Warren Ellis sexual coercion allegations; lots more but here’s an early overview from the Guardian
“FogHorn Barge” from Daniel Simon @ SoundBible, CC BY 3.0
James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand
David Runciman’s “Are we doomed?” for LRB
Degrowth
KSR’s The Ministry for the Future
E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again
Strange Horizons’ “Ageing in Science Fiction” special issue
Shintaro Kago’s Dementia 21
Julia Armfield’s Private Rites
Jacqueline Nyathi’s Harare Review of Books
David Brin's Earth
Jerry Pournelle
Dan's Bluesky
The Clarke shortlist discussion will appear on Nerds of a Feather
Tenacious D
The Long Winters
The Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA)
1 hr 14 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…