The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome R.S.A. Garcia, author of The Nightward.

About The Nightward: For 500 years Gaiea’s Hand has stood as a ward against the Dark. The Age of Chaos is a faded memory. The Goddess has left Gailand and given her Blessing to the Queens to rule in her stead.

Princess Viella of the court of Hamber is the Spirit of Gaiea, presumptive heir to the throne and budding wielder of magic. And yet she’s still a child—not yet ten years old—and a day spent evading her teachers and her dutiful bodyguard, Luka, is much more satisfying than learning about telepathy, illusions, and other spells, or obeying even her mother, the Queen.

There is time enough…until there isn’t.

For the night the Queen hosts the Ceremony to confirm Viella as the next Hand of Gaiea, everything changes for her—in the most horrific way imaginable: the assassination of Viella’s mother.

Now Viella is Queen.

Luka, despite resenting his position as royal babysitter, does not hesitate. He rushes his charge from the Court and vows to keep her safe. Yet he is unsure how to help a burgeoning Hand of Gaiea, let alone contend with his place as a man in a matriarchal world and the secret that is burning inside him.

Together, they are on the run from darkness in a world where the lines between magic and technology are blurring and it’s up to a child and her protector to bring clarity and light back to the Queendom.

About R.S.A. Garcia: R.S.A. is a Nebula and Sturgeon Award winning writer of speculative fiction. She is also the winner of the Machine Intelligence Foundation for Rights and Ethics’ 2023 Media Award, and a Locus, Ignyte and Eugie Foster Award finalist.

Her Amazon Bestselling science fiction mystery, Lex Talionis, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and the Silver Medal for Best Scifi/Fantasy/Horror Ebook from the Independent Publishers Awards (2015).

She has published short fiction in venues such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Escape Pod, Strange Horizons, The Sunday Morning Transport, and Internazionale Magazine.

Her stories have been long-listed for the British Science Fiction Awards, translated into several languages, and included in a number of anthologies, including the critically acclaimed The Best of World SF, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and The Apex Book of World SF.

Her sci-fantasy duology, beginning with The Nightward, is forthcoming from Harper Voyager US, October, 2024.

She lives in Trinidad and Tobago with an extended family and too many cats.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 643-With R.S.A. Garcia appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Mike Chen, author of Marvel: What If . . . Marc Spector Was Host to Venom? (A Moon Knight & Venom Story).

About Marvel: What If . . . Marc Spector Was Host to Venom? (A Moon Knight & Venom Story): Marc Spector is used to voices in his head. He’s used to waking up disoriented, unsure what his alters, Jake and Steven, might have been up to. He’s used to having an Egyptian god command him as Moon Knight, his avatar of justice and revenge. What he’s not used to: staring into the face of a literal out-of-body doppelgänger.

Another Marc crash-landed from an alternate reality, begging for help? Yeah, that is a new one, even for him.

But before he can really process anything beyond Khonshu’s incessant alarm bells, it becomes clear this other Marc didn’t travel solo. Some kind of alien—a symbiote named Venom—casts off its current host and begins to merge with Marc, forcing Khonshu away from his chosen champion and claiming Moon Knight for its own. The formerly stark white suit that struck fear into the hearts of criminals now looms as a jet-black shadow over friends and foes alike. Marc’s lethal prowess, fueled by Venom’s penchant for violence, carves a trail of chaos as they comb through the vigilante’s torturous past.

Yet a sliver of hope remains: Finally free of Venom’s control, the other Jake and Steven regain consciousness to find themselves in a strange reality, without their Marc but with a strange bird-like god insisting that “they will do.” Desperate, lost, and running out of time, the pair make a deal: become Khonshu’s new avatar to track Venom’s path of destruction, save this universe, and just maybe figure out a way back to their own.

About Mike Chen: Mike Chen is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Brotherhood, Here and Now and Then, A Quantum Love Story, and other novels, as well as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine comics. He has covered geek culture for sites such as Nerdist and The Mary Sue, and in a different life, he’s covered the NHL. A member of SFWA, Mike lives in the Bay Area with his wife, daughter, and many rescue animals. Follow him on Twitter, Bluesky, and Instagram: @mikechenwriter

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 642-With Mike Chen appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Curtis C. Chen, author of TRUE BLUE KANGAROO.

About TRUE BLUE KANGAROO: Welcome to the spacefaring future, where humanity travels between planets with ease and has abused that power to establish outposts in some questionable places.

Take Venus, for example: a sister world to Mother Earth, similar in size and gravity, it’s also known for having a toxic atmosphere and hellish landscape at ground level. But climate-controlled habitat domes stay in eternal sunlight and offer vacationers endless good times while floating through blue skies above the clouds of deadly acid.

Meanwhile, hidden down inside those poisonous clouds are other floating habitats, so-called “blue sites”—government-controlled secret prisons where inmates are incarcerated with no oversight and no hope of escape.

And why, pray tell, would secret agent Kangaroo, with his pocket superpower and bleeding-edge biotech implants, need to infiltrate such a secure facility? Might it be to rescue another spy who’s gone radio silent? Or perhaps to extract a high value asset who claims to have been wrongly imprisoned therein? Possibly both?

It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. Questions are a burden to others, and answers a prison for oneself.

What do you want? Information? That would be telling.

About Curtis C. Chen: Once a Silicon Valley software engineer, Curtis C. Chen (???) now writes stories near Portland, Oregon. He’s the author of the KANGAROO series of funny science fiction spy thrillers and has written for the Realm original podcasts Echo Park, Ninth Step Murders, and Machina. Curtis’ shorter works have appeared in Playboy Magazine; the ENNIE Award-winning Kobold Guide to Roleplaying; The Year’s Best Fantasy, Volume 2; Aliens vs. Predators: Ultimate Prey; and elsewhere. His homebrew cat feeding robot was displayed in the “Worlds Beyond Here” exhibit at Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 641-With Curtis C. Chen appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Two-Time Hugo Award winner Paul Weimer.

About Paul Weimer: Paul Weimer is a Two-Time 2024 Hugo Award winner for Fan Writer and Fanzine (Editor). Not really a Prince of Amber, but rather, an ex-pat New Yorker living in Minnesota, Paul Weimer has been reading sci-fi and fantasy for over 40 years. An avid and enthusiastic amateur photographer, blogger and podcaster, Paul primarily contributes to the Skiffy and Fanty Show as blogger and podcaster, to Nerds of a Feather as a reviewer and interviewer, to the SFF Audio podcast, and turns up elsewhere as well. If you’ve spent any time reading about SFF online, you’ve probably read one of his reviews, comments or tweets (he’s @PrinceJvstin).

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 640-With Paul Weimer appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome John Jackson Miller, author of BATMAN: RESURRECTION.

About BATMAN: RESURRECTION: The Joker is dead, but not forgotten. Gotham City is saved, but it is still not safe. By night, its new symbol of hope, Batman, continues his fight to protect the innocent and the powerless. By day, his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, wonders whether there may someday be a future beyond skulking the city’s rooftops or the cavernous halls of his stately manor alongside the ever-dutiful Alfred Pennyworth.

But even after death, the Clown Prince of Crime’s imprint can be seen in more than just the pavement. Remnants from The Joker’s gang are leading wannabes fascinated by his bizarre mystique on a campaign of arson that threatens the city—even as it serves greedy opportunists, including millionaire Max Shreck. And survivors of exposure to The Joker’s chemical weapon Smylex continue to crowd Gotham City’s main hospital.

To quell the chaos, Batman needs more than his cape and his well-stocked Utility Belt. Bruce Wayne is forced into action, prompting a partnership with a charismatic scientist to help solve the health crisis. But as he works in both the shadows and the light, Bruce finds himself drawn deeper into Gotham City’s turmoil than ever before, fueling his obsession to save the city—an obsession that has already driven a wedge between him and Vicki Vale. The loyal Alfred, who had hoped Bruce’s efforts as Batman could help him find closure, finds the opposite happening. Nightmares begin to prompt Bruce to ask new questions about the climactic events in the cathedral, and investigations by Commissioner Gordon and reporter Alexander Knox into the arsons only amplify his concerns.

Having told the people of Gotham City that they’d earned a rest from crime, Batman finds the forces of evil growing ever more organized—and orchestrated—by a sinister hand behind the scenes. The World’s Greatest Detective must solve the greatest mystery of all: Could The Joker have somehow survived? And could he still have the last laugh against the people of Gotham City?

About John Jackson Miller: New York Times bestselling author John Jackson Miller has spent a lifetime immersed in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction. He’s best known for his Star Wars and Star Trek work, including Star Wars: Kenobi, his Scribe Award winning novel from Del Rey; Star Wars: A New Dawn; the Star Trek: Prey trilogy, and Star Trek: Discovery – The Enterprise War.

He’s also written comics included the long-running Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic comics series, as well as comics for Battlestar Galactica, Halo, Lion King, Mass Effect, Iron Man, Indiana Jones, and The Simpsons. Production notes on all his works can be found at his fiction site (farawaypress.com).

Miller is also a noted comics industry historian, specializing in studying comic-book circulation as presented on his website, Comichron (comichron.com). He also coauthored the Standard Catalog of Comic Books series.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 639-With John Jackson Miller appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Luis Jaramillo, author of The Witches of El Paso.

About The Witches of El Paso: 1943, El Paso, Texas: teenager Nena spends her days caring for the small children of her older sisters, while longing for a life of freedom and adventure. The premonitions and fainting spells she has endured since childhood are getting worse, and Nena worries she’ll end up like the scary old curandera down the street. Nena prays for help, and when the mysterious Sister Benedicta arrives late one night, Nena follows her across the borders of space and time. In colonial Mexico, Nena grows into her power, finding love and learning that magic always comes with a price.

In the present day, Nena’s grandniece, Marta, balances a struggling legal aid practice with motherhood and the care of the now ninety-three-year-old Nena. When Marta agrees to help search for a daughter Nena left in the past, the two forge a fierce connection. Marta’s own supernatural powers emerge, awakening her to new possibilities that threaten the life she has constructed.

About Luis Jaramillo: Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Doctor’s Wife, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest, an Oprah Book of the Week, and one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012. His novel The Witches of El Paso (Atria/Simon & Schuster) will be published in the fall of 2024. Luis’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, Lit Hub, Poets & Writers Magazine, BOMB Magazine and the Chattahoochee Review, among other publications. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at The New School. He received an undergraduate degree from Stanford and an MFA from The New School.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 638-With Luis Jaramillo appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Martha Wells, author of the updated and revised version of Wheel of the Infinite.

About the updated and revised version of Wheel of the Infinite: A traitor and a swordsman join forces to save the world from being rewritten into devastation.

Every year the image of the Wheel of the Infinite must be painstakingly remade to ensure another year of peace and harmony for the Celestial Empire. Every hundred years the very fabric of the world must be rewoven. Linked by the mystic energies of the Infinite, the Wheel and world are one. But a black storm is spreading across the Wheel, reappearing each morning, bigger and darker than before, unraveling the beautiful and orderly patterns.

Maskelle, a murderer and traitor, has been summoned back to help put the world right with the assistance of the mysterious Rian, a swordsman of some renown. If they can’t find the source of the problems that plague the Wheel, the world may find its latest rotation is its last.

About Martha Wells: Martha Wells has been an SF/F writer since her first fantasy novel was published in 1993, and her work includes The Books of the Raksura series, the Ile-Rien series, The Murderbot Diaries series, and other fantasy novels, most recently Witch King (Tordotcom, 2023). She has also written media tie-in fiction for Star Wars, Stargate: Atlantis, and Magic: the Gathering, as well as short fiction, YA novels, and non-fiction. She has won Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, Locus Awards, and a Dragon Award, and her work has appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the BSFA Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, the Sunday Times Bestseller List, and the New York Times Bestseller List. She is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and her books have been published in thirty languages.

She is also a consulting producer on the Murderbot series for Apple TV+.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 637-With Martha Wells appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Peter F. Hamilton, author of Exodus: The Archimedes Engine.

About Exodus: The Archimedes Engine: In a past age, humanity fled a dying Earth in massive ark ships. These searched the galaxy to find a new home. Then one fleet found Centauri, a dense cluster of stars teeming with habitable planets. Now, thousands of years later, Centauri’s settlers have evolved into advanced beings known as Celestials – and their great houses rule vast star systems.

As they vie for supremacy, Earth’s ark ships continue to arrive, and humans must serve these repressive masters. But is there a better life beyond the empire? Finn is a Centauri-born human and yearns for a brighter future. So, when another ark ship arrives, previously thought lost, Finn seizes the chance to become a Traveler. These heroes explore the vast unknowns of distant space, dedicated to humanity’s survival. And they hope – one day – to find freedom.

About Peter F. Hamilton: Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland in 1960. He began writing in 1987, and sold his first short story to FEAR Magazine in 1988. He has written many bestselling novels, including the Greg Mandel series, the Night’s Dawn trilogy, the Commonwealth Saga, the Void trilogy, the Chronicle of the Fallers and the Salvation Sequence, as well as short-story collections and several standalone titles, including Fallen Dragon and Great North Road.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 636-With Peter F. Hamilton appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Stephanie Wrobel, author of THE HITCHCOCK HOTEL.

About THE HITCHCOCK HOTEL: Alfred Smettle is not your average Hitchcock fan. He is the founder, owner, and manager of The Hitchcock Hotel, a sprawling Victorian house in the White Mountains dedicated to the Master of Suspense. There, Alfred offers his guests round-the-clock film screenings, movie props and memorabilia in every room, plus an aviary with fifty crows.

To celebrate the hotel’s first anniversary, he invites his former best friends from his college Film Club for a reunion. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in sixteen years, not after what happened.

But who better than them to appreciate Alfred’s creation? And to help him finish it.

After all, no Hitchcock set is complete without a body.

About Stephanie Wrobel: Stephanie Wrobel is an international and USA Today bestselling author. Her debut, Darling Rose Gold, has sold rights in twenty-one countries and was a finalist for the Edgar® Award for Best First Novel. Wrobel grew up in Chicago and now lives in New York City. THE HITCHCOCK HOTEL will be released on September 24, 2024.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 635-With Stephanie Wrobel appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Ken Liu, translator of Laozi’s Dao De Jing.

About Laozi’s Dao De Jing: Laozi’s Dao De Jing was written around 400 BC by a compassionate soul in a world torn by hatred and ambition, dominated by those that yearned for apocalyptic confrontations and prized ideology over experience. By speaking out against the cleverness of elites and the arrogance of the learned, Laozi upheld the wisdom of the concrete, the humble, the quotidian, the everyday individual dismissed by the great powers of the world. Earthy, playful, and defiant, Laozi’s words gave solace to souls back then, and offer comfort today. Now, this beautifully designed new edition serves as both an accessible new translation of an ancient Chinese classic and a fascinating account of renowned novelist Ken Liu’s transformative experience while wrestling with the classic text.

Throughout this translation, Liu takes us through his own struggles to capture the meaning in Laozi’s text in a series of thoughtful and provocative interstitial entries. Unlike traditional notes that purport to be objective, these entries are explicitly personal and unapologetically subjective. Gradually, as Liu learns that true wisdom cannot be pinned down in words, the notes grow sparser until they fade away entirely. His journey suggests the only way out of struggle is to engage with texts that have survived the millennia, wrestling with ideas that gesture at something eternal, in hopes that we might eventually reach that moment of transcendent joy.

Liu’s translation, by eschewing cleverness, paradoxically reveals the slipperiness of Laozi’s original. The Dao De Jing has been translated countless times and will be translated countless times in the future. In that constant change and flow, we finally find our home in Dao, the eternal principle that allows us, finite beings in time and space, to reckon and reconcile with the infinite.

About Ken Liu: Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards for his fiction, he has also won top genre honors abroad in Japan, Spain, and France.

Liu’s most characteristic work is the four-volume epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers, not wizards, are the heroes of a silkpunk world on the verge of modernity. His debut collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, followed. He also penned the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

He’s often involved in media adaptations of his work. Recent projects include “The Message,” under development by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment; “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in season one of Netflix’s breakout adult animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, with Craig Silverstein as executive producer, adapted from an interconnected series of Liu’s short stories.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

In addition to his original fiction, Liu also occasionally publishes literary translations. His most recent work of translation is a new rendition of Laozi’s Dao De Jing.

Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

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