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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Abigail Nussbaum
• Title: Excession by Iain M. Banks
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Vector
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• The Guardian
• Strange Horizons
• Lawyers, Guns & Money
• Warren Zevon
• Asking the Wrong Questions
• Abigail’s Track Changes
• Colourfields by Paul Kincaid
• Nina Allan’s Granite Silence and The Art of Space Travel
• Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis
• Banks’ Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, & The Player of Games
• Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism
• Star Trek
• John le Carré
• Andor
• Transmentation Transience by Darkly Lem
• Outside Context Problems & Aggressive Hegemonizing Swarms
• Stanislaw Lem
• Kubrick/Clarke's 2001
• Paul Kincaid's biography of Banks
• Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are
• C.J. Cherryh
• Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's Salvager books
• Greg Egan
• Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch
• Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire
• Banks’ Look to Windward
• Abigail's Bluesky
• Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future
• Ned Beauman's Venomous Lumpsucker
• Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Arkady Martine
• Title: 40,000 in Gehenna by C.J. Cherryh
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Vote in the Ignytes!
• Our episode with Archita Mittra
• A Memory Called Empire, A Desolation Called Peace, Rose/House, "Three Faces of a Beheading"
• Mick Herron’s Slow Horses
• Pip Adams' Audition
• André Alexis’s Other Worlds
• Thomas Ha’s Uncertain Sons
• Stephen Sondheim's Assassins
• Cherryh’s Cyteen, Downbelow Station, Foreigner
• Watsonian vs. Doylist readings
• The Faded Sun, Hunter of Worlds
• Leonard Cohen's "The Future"
• Theodore Sturgeon's "The Golden Helix"
• Internet Science Fiction Database (ISFDB)
• Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Rocannon's World
• Joanna Russ's The Female Man
• Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern
• Serpent's Reach
• Amal El-Mohtar
• Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown
• Emmanuel Levinas & Martin Buber
• Octavia E. Butler
• "Third Person Intense Internal"
• Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode
• Elizabeth Bear
• Ann Leckie, Tamsyn Muir, Jeff VanderMeer
• Ancillary Justice
• Lois McMaster Bujold
• Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant & our episode on it
• Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence
• A Pattern Language
• David Brin, Vernor Vinge
• Arkady's Bluesky
• Louis Kahn
• 4th Street Fantasy
• Viable Paradise
• Wiscon
• Wesley Andrews
• The Briar
• SK Coffee
• Bogart's Doughnut
• Northeast Tea House
• DreamHaven
• Uncle Hugo’s
• Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and The Motion of Light in Water
• Cherryh's Wave Without A Shore
• Greg Egan's Phoresis
• Kathy Mar's "Forty Thousand in Gehenna" from the album "Finity's End and other Songs of the Station Trade"

Wizards vs. Lesbians episode with Ann Leckie on C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: andré m. carrington
• Title: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• andré’s Speculative Blackness, The Black Fantastic, and Audiofuturism (forthcoming)
• The Eaton Conference
• Malik Gaines & Alexandro Segade's cosmic opera Star Choir, based on the work of Octavia E. Butler
• Hanna Yanagahira's To Paradise
• Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season
• George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire
• N.K. Jemisin
• Michael Zapata’s The Lost Book of Adana Moreau
• Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do
• Andew Stanton’s Wall-E
• Becky Chambers' Monk & Robot
• Olaf Stapledon
• Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future
• andré's Bluesky
• Audio.futurism Instagram

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Roseanna Pendlebury
• Titles: The 2025 Hugo Novel & Novella List
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde and John WM Thompson

References:

• Hugo Novella Finalists:
• The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo
• The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed
• Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard
• The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar
• The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler
• What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
• Hugo Novel Finalists:
• Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
• Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell
• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
• The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
• The Clarke Award list
• Paul Kincaid’s Coulorfields
• Roseanna’s “A Path Through the Landscape” for A Reader of Else, plus Paul Kincaid’s “The Books That Made Me” for Through the dark labyrinth
• Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti
• Casella’s idea of a Hugo for Best Translated Work
• Renay's Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom
• Alex Jeffers’s A Mourning Coat
• Lorraine Wilson’s Last to Drown
• The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize
• The Ignyte Awards
• Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass
• Vajra Chandraskera’s Rakesfall
• Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage
• Seth Dickinson’s Exordia and The Traitor Baru Cormorant
• Emet North’s In Universes
• Eden Robin’s Remember You Will Die
• Scott Guild's Plastic
• Aliya Whiteley's Three Eight One
• T. Kingfisher’s Saint of Steel books
• Marie Brennan's A Natural History of Dragons
• Robert Jackson Bennett’s Divine Cities and Founders trilogies
• Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds
• Greg Egan
• Charlie Stross's Neptune’s Brood
• Zachary Gillan’s “Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism”
• Foz Meadow’s A Strange and Stubborn Endurance
• Roseanna's review of Someone To Build A Nest In
• Brad Wright’s Travelers
• Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché’s Prophet
• Roseanna’s Small Press Dispatch column
• Nerds of a Feather

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Maia Gil′Adí
• Title: The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Palgrave SFF: A New Canon
• The Zombie Archive
• Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence
• Augustina Bazterrica's Tender is the Flesh
• Fernanda Trias' Pink Slime
• Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
• Colson Whitehead's Zone One
• Toni Morrison's Beloved
• Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season
• Indrapramit Das
• Brendan Shay Basham's Swim Home to the Vanished & Casella’s review
• Mariana Enriquez's Our Share of Night
• Fredric Jameson
• Chicago Review of Books Awards
• Ilana Masad’s “Holocaust Beach Reads” for The Maris Review
• Jason (Friday the 13th)
• Simón Bolívar
• August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, C.L. Moore
• Moebius/Jean Giraud
• Ancient Aliens
• Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter & adaptation
• Studs Terkel
• US Occupation of the Dominican Republic, 1916
• Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Jonbar points
• Aimee Pokwatka's Self-Portrait with Nothing
• Lavie Tidhar's The Circumference of the Earth & Unholy Land
• Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• Sesshu Foster's Atomic Aztecs
• Maia on Bluesky

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Sean McTiernan
• Title: Dreams of Amputation by Gary J. Shipley
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcribers: Kate Dollarhyde

References:

• The SFUltra podcast
• Alasdair Gray’s Lanark & Poor Things
• James Joyce’s Ulysses
• Fredric Jameson
• Absolute DC comics
• Michael Comeau’s Hellberta
• Alan Grant & John Wagner’s Doomlord
• Ray Nayler’s Where the Axe is Buried
• Neil Sharpson’s When The Sparrow Falls
• Michael Mann's Blackhat
• Later Die Hards
• Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State
• Jean Baudrillard
• Shipley’s Stratagem of the Corpse, Crypt(o)spasm, and Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology
• Dennis Cooper
• Blake Butler’s “Sci-Fi Doesn’t Have to Be Dominated by Horny Bro Wizards” for Vice
• Darko Suvin
• Manuela Draeger's Kree (and Antoine Volodine’s other work)
• Mark Danielewski
• B.R. Yeager
• Apocalypse Party
• William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch
• Neal Stephenson
• Daniel Dennett
• Memetics
• Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly
• J.G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, John Updike
• Blake Butler’s Uxa.gov & the SFUltra episode
• Christopher Priest’s “Hull 0, Scunthorpe 3”
• Brian Evenson, Pierre Guyotat
• Harrison's Nova Swing
• Tad Williams' Otherland
• Derek Raymond (Rober Cook)’s He Died With His Eyes Open
• Thomas Metzinger The Ego Tunnel
• Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo
• Evenson’s Last Days / Brotherhood of Mutilation
• William Gibson, Bruce Sterling
• Warhammer 40k
• Ballard's Crash
• Curt Siodmak’s Donovan's Brain
• Matt from Bookpilled
• Nick Land
• CCRU & Dark Enlightenment
• Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil, Cool Memories, The Perfect Crime
• Mark Fisher, Kodwu Eshun, Kode9
• Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle”
• Andrea Dworkin
• Brion Gysin
• Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes
• Walter Hill's The Driver
• Brian Catling
• Ian Sinclair
• SFUltra episodes on Lanark, Poor Things, and Catling

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

Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!

Credits:

• Guest: Christian P. Haines
• Titles: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein, and The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz 
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Transcriber: Kate Dollarhyde

References:

• Stephen King's The Shining and Carrie
• Rafael Bernal’s His Name Was Death
• Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy
• Daryl Gregory’s When We Were Real
• Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, Christian’s review for ARB
• Io9
• Our Opinions Are Correct
• Heinlein’s Starship Troopers
• Christian’s The Terraformers review for LARB
• Newitz’s Autonomous
• Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, The Rolling Stones
• Archer
• Milton Friedman
• Orwell’s 1984
• Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
• James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse
• Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
• Ian McDonald’s New Moon trilogy
• Frank Herbert’s Dune
• Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17
• Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
• Jo Walton's Among Others and our episode on it
• Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering
• "Engineering Swallows Up Politics"
• Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock
• KSR’s Aurora
• McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red
• Ulrich Haarbürste’s Roy Orbison Wrapped in Clingfilm
• Star Trek's “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”
• Spinoza’s idea of conatus
• Walter Kaufman's introduction to Martin Buber's I and Thou
• Kant's Categorical Imperative
• Abbot Elementary
• Delany’s Trouble On Triton
• Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents
• Marx’s Capital
• John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar
• Kohei Sato’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto
• KSR’s The Ministry for the Future, New York 2140
• Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest
• Gamers with Glasses
• Five Theses on Antifascist Game Criticism

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