On this episode, Carmanita officially joins Booklovers as a cohost! To celebrate, we discuss two short story collections by award-winning master speculative fiction authors N.K. Jemisin and Ted Chiang. We open with an attempt at defining speculative fiction and then shift to discuss both collections in a general way before finding threads of commonality and contrast across pairs of stories. We close with a discussion of some of our favorite stories from both collections. Come for the dialogue and comity, stay for the publishing awards hot takes and a hilarious anecdote about Tamagotchi.