Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Gary talks with Hugo and Nebula Award winner Suzy McKee Charnas about the delights of a public library during lockdown, her own pioneering work in feminist SF and vampire fiction, a new novel about Bram Stoker, returning to the reliable work of Poul Anderson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas A. Disch, and Joanna Russ, and her own forthcoming titles from Aqueduct Press.

Books mentioned include:

• The Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Hugo award-winning writer and longtime Locus editor Tim Pratt talks with Gary about serving on juries for two different awards in the same year (the LA Times Ray Bradbury Prize and the Philip K. Dick Award), worrying about the fires that everyone in California worries about at this time of year, the appeal of mystery and crime fiction, and of fantasy novels that only imply a larger world rather than spelling it out in detail, and his own forthcoming alternate universe novel, Doors of Sleep.

Books mentioned include:

• Doors of Sleep by Tim Pratt

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

One of China’s most widely-honoured SF writers, Chen Qiufan (or Stanley Chan, for English speakers and as a tribute to Stanley Kubrick) joins Gary for a fascinating discussion of apocalyptic literature seen from a perspective of a culture that views the future as repeating itself rather than ending, the importance shifting patterns of growth to stress employment and sustainability, neuroscience as it might relate to meditation or Buddhism, and the uses of AI (including the language model GPT-2) in fiction as it develops its capacity for natural language.

Books mentioned include:

• Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan

For their 500th episode (if you count the shorter “10 Minutes With” episodes they’ve been doing since March), Jonathan and Gary characteristically fail to achieve any sort of clear structure for the discussion but do return to some favourite themes. While we manage to avoid reopening the old canon of worms, we do talk about what science fiction cultural literacy might look like—not in terms of specific works, but in terms of concepts and techniques, and how they might change over time. Would a reader of Gardner Dozois’s first “year’s best” anthology feel any sense of familiarity with Jonathan’s volume from 2020? And as usual, we look at the year so far, some forthcoming books to look for, and the pleasures we’ve had in chatting with new and old friends in our shorter lockdown-era podcasts.

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Only recently back from several months in India, Vandana Singh joins Gary to talk about what experiencing lockdown was like near Delhi and the hardships of day workers suddenly laid off and walking long distances back to their villages, the challenges to a speculative fiction writer of unexpectedly living in a 'bad science fiction novel' and some of the comforts of reading poetry, a novel set in remote Nagaland, 'magical realism' in the stories of Gogu Shyamala, and even Harry Potter.

Books mentioned include:

• Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories by Vandana Singh

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Today Jonathan gets to spend talking to one of New Zealand's finest writers, Elizabeth Knox, who joins the conversation from Wellington (home of the 2020 WorldCon) to talk about living, working and writing during the pandemic, the joys to be found in reading absolutely everything by Diana Wynne Jones and Patrick O'Brian, her new novel The Absolute Book (due in the US in 2021 in a revised edition), and much more.

Books mentioned include:

• The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

Today Gary is joined by Crawford Award-winning and World Fantasy Award- nominated Swedish author Karin Tidbeck, discussing her remarkable 2010 Clarion class (three Crawford winners!), the audio narrating skills of Robin Miles, listening to Sandman as an audio drama, the work of Garth Nix and Tove Janssen, a fascinating new novel still awaiting English publication, and her forthcoming The Memory Theatre.

Books mentioned include:

• Amatka by Karin Tidbeck

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

World Fantasy Life Achievement winner John Crowley chats with Gary about his oddly prescient horror story “Spring Break” (which he says is his only horror story), the evocative prose of Graham Greene’s thrillers, the terror of Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge, and his own recent collections of essays and stories.

Books mentioned include:

• And Go Like This: Stories by John Crowley

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

World Fantasy Award Life Achievement recipient and WorldCon Guest of Honor Charles de Lint joins Jonathan to discuss living, working, and reading in these strange times, what he's been working on, the relationship between his work and contemporary urban fantasy, the rewards he's found in taking control of his own publishing, and a new series of urban fantasy novels set in Newford, starting with Juniper Wiles, which he is planning for later this year.

Books mentioned include:

• The Wind in His Heart by Charles de Lint

Ten minutes with... is a special series presented by Coode Street that sees readers and booklovers from around the world talk about what they're reading right now and what's getting them through these difficult times.

One of the UK's most distinguished novelists, Christopher Priest, joins Gary to discuss how from the beginning he strived for consistency in his body of work, how the lockdown seems to represent a historical discontinuity comparable to World War II, the war's effect on writers such as John Wyndham, H.E. Bates, and Rex Warner, his frustrating experiences with the film version of The Prestige, his recent retrospective story collection, and his forthcoming novel.

Books mentioned include:

• The Prestige by Christopher Priest