This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Lauren J. A. Bear, author of MOTHER OF ROME.

About MOTHER OF ROME: The names Romulus and Remus may be immortalized in map and stone and chronicle, but their mother exists only as a preface to her sons’ journey, the princess turned oath-breaking priestess, condemned to death alongside her children.

But she did not die; she survived. And so does her story.

Beautiful, royal, rich: Rhea has it all—until her father loses his kingdom in a treacherous coup, and she is sent to the order of the Vestal Virgins to ensure she will never produce an heir.

Except when mortals scheme, gods laugh.

Rhea becomes pregnant, and human society turns against her. Abandoned, ostracized, and facing the gravest punishment, Rhea forges a dangerous deal with the divine, one that will forever change the trajectory of her life…and her beloved land.

To save her sons and reclaim their birthright, Rhea must summon nature’s mightiest force – a mother’s love – and fight.

All roads may lead to Rome, but they began with Rhea Silvia.

About Lauren J. A. Bear: Lauren J.A. Bear is a reader and writer, an educator, a troublemaker, and a fierce mama bear.

Lauren was born in Boston and raised in Long Beach, CA. After studying English at UCLA and Education at LMU, she taught middle-school Humanities for over a decade — and survived! She is a teaching fellow for the Holocaust Center for Humanity, and lives in Seattle with her husband and three young children. She likes crossword puzzles and being on or near the water without getting wet.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 647-With Lauren J. A. Bear appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Katherine Villyard, author of IMMORTAL GIFTS.

About IMMORTAL GIFTS: Prussia, 1841. Abraham only ever wanted to play violin. Hiding his Jewish status so he can study at the prestigious Berlin Academy of Music, the eager young man is delighted to find a patron who believes in him. But he’s mortified when his new friend turns him into a vampire… and Abraham earns the fury of an ancient antisemite who vows to see him permanently dead.

Fleeing the hate-mongering fiend across the decades, the sensitive violinist at last settles in twenty-first-century New Jersey with a mortal woman. But when he discovers his relentless tormentor has tracked him down yet again, Abraham despairs he’ll never find true happiness.

With everyone he’s ever loved at risk, can he escape the rage of a ruthless bigot?

About Katherine Villyard: Katherine Villyard was born in Dallas, Texas. Her father was civilian support for the military, so she moved every two years and attended four different high schools. The most exotic one to US readers will probably be Kaiserslautern American High School in Germany, but her favorite was Arts Magnet High School at Booker T. Washington in Dallas, where she studied theater. She also went through a phase where she wore a lot of white dresses and sat in windowsills writing (bad) poetry; what she called her “Emily Dickinson phase.”

Katherine is a former Microsoft MVP in Enterprise Security and Cloud and Datacenter Management, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, a member of the Horror Writers Association, and the President of Broad Universe. She has a tendency to develop nerdy fascinations and research binge. Previous topics include Pueblo pottery, Navajo weaving, Pre-Columbian art, Frida Kahlo, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her work has appeared in Escape Pod, Electric Velocipede, and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination.

When she’s not writing, working, or research binging, she’s probably spoiling cats or playing The Sims.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 646-With Katherine Villyard appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Cerece Rennie Murphy, author of In the Garden of Light and Shadow.

About In the Garden of Light and Shadow: 4000 years ago, a rebellion in the Ever brought angels to live among us.

At first, they were worshiped as gods.

But that was not enough.

And in their hunger for power,

Evil claimed their hearts

and made them demons.

Lilavois St. James rose to fight them.

As a member of the Sisters of Light, she swore an oath to use the magic of the moon to battle the demons and defend humankind.

Until one day, she met a demon and fell in love.

And I was born.

About Cerece Rennie Murphy: Cerece Rennie Murphy is the national bestselling and award-winning author of ten novels, children’s books, and short stories. She is also the founder of Virtuous Con, an online science fiction and comic culture convention that celebrates the excellence of BIPOC creators in speculative fiction, across the mediums of fiction, comics, film, and visual arts.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 645-With Cerece Rennie Murphy appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

In a very special JUST US episode of the podcast this week, Patrick and Tracy are talking about cats, Dungeons & Dragons, Patreon, coffee, Star Wars coffee mugs, working out, black Friday, smart tvs, peopling, weddings, San Diego ComiCon, conventions, Denver’s Pop Culture Con, the holidays and gift giving, kids, family, spreadsheets, pivot tables, gift cards, restaurant menus, holiday music, Mariah Carey, The Wall Street Journal’s news podcast, Spotify, the Table of Ultimate Gaming kickstarter (2018), Pathfinder 2E, the Glass Cannon podcast, Hasbro, Philips Hue smart light bulbs and strips, and so much more…

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 644-Just Us and the Holidays appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

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.