The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Kat Howard, author of A SLEIGHT OF SHADOWS.

About A SLEIGHT OF SHADOWS: After taking down the source of the corruption of the Unseen World, Sydney is left with almost no magical ability. Feeling estranged from herself, she is determined to find a way back to her status as one of the world’s most dangerous magicians. Unfortunately, she needs to do this quickly: the House of Shadows, the hell on earth that shaped her into who she was, the place she sacrificed everything to destroy, is rebuilding itself.

“The House of shadows sits on bones. All of the sacrifices, all of the magicians who died in Shadows, they’re buried beneath the foundations. Bones hold magic.”

The magic of the Unseen World is acting strangely, faltering, bleeding out from the edges. Determined to keep the House of Shadows from returning to power and to defeat the magicians who want nothing more than to have it back, Sydney turns to extremes in a desperate attempt to regain her sacrificed magic. She is forced to decide what she will give up and what she will lose and whether what must be destroyed is not only the House of Shadows, but the Unseen World itself.

About Kat Howard: Kat Howard is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and horror who lives and writes in Minnesota.

Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was one of NPR’s best books of 2014, and her debut novel, Roses and Rot was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel. An Unkindness of Magicians was named a best book of 2017 by NPR, and won a 2018 Alex Award. Her short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, collects work that has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, performed as part of Selected Shorts, and anthologized in year’s best and best of volumes, as well as new pieces original to the collection. She was the writer for the first 18 issues of The Books of Magic, part of DC Comics’ Sandman Universe. Her next novel, A Sleight of Shadows, the sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians, is coming April 25, 2023. In the past, she’s been a competitive fencer and a college professor.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 580-With Kat Howard appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Daniel M. Ford, author of THE WARDEN.

About THE WARDEN: There was a plan.

She had the money, the connections, even the brains. It was simple: become one of the only female necromancers, earn as many degrees as possible, get a post in one of the grand cities, then prove she’s capable of greatness. The funny thing about plans is that they are seldom under your control.

Now Aelis de Lenti, a daughter of a noble house and recent graduate of the esteemed Magisters’ Lyceum, finds herself in the far-removed village of Lone Pine. Mending fences, matching wits with goats, and serving people who want nothing to do with her. But, not all is well in Lone Pine, and as the villagers Aelis is reluctantly getting to know start to behave strangely, Aelis begins to suspect that there is far greater need for a Warden of her talents than she previously thought.

Old magics are restless, and an insignificant village on the farthest border of the kingdom might hold secrets far beyond what anyone expected. Aelis might be the only person standing between one of the greatest evils ever known and the rest of the world.

About Daniel M. Ford: Daniel M. Ford was born and raised near Baltimore, Maryland. He holds a B.A. in English from Villanova University, an M.A. in Irish Literature from Boston College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, concentrating in Poetry, from George Mason University. As a poet, his work has appeared most recently in Soundings Review, as well as Phoebe, Floorboard Review, The Cossack, and Vending Machine Press. He teaches English at a college prep high school in North East, Maryland. Ordination is his first novel.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 579-With Daniel M. Ford appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Emily Tesh, author of SOME DESPERATE GLORY.

About SOME DESPERATE GLORY: Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the majoda their victory over humanity.

They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. When Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to Nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.

Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr escapes from everything she’s known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.

About Emily Tesh: Emily Tesh is the author of the Greenhollow Duology, which begins with Silver in the Wood and concludes with Drowned Country. Tesh is a winner of the Astounding Award and of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. Some Desperate Glory, her first novel, is forthcoming in 2022 from tordotcom publishing.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

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This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Julie Novakova and Susan Forest, two of the driving forces behind Life Beyond Us: An Original Anthology of SF Stories and Science Essays.

About Life Beyond Us: An Original Anthology of SF Stories and Science Essays: How would first contact—on earth, in space, on another planet—transform our understandings of technology, philosophy, and what it means to be human? What kind of cognitive dissonance would society experience, if we discovered a previously unrecognized sentience on Earth?

What would life be like if it originated in a frigid ocean beneath an impenetrable shell of ice? Or on a world whose haze obscures any view of the universe beyond? Or on an unfathomable scale in the depths of space?

Life—beyond us.

Dive in as the European Astrobiology Institute presents fifty-four original SF Stories and Science Essays on life, from microbial to macro, from automatic to sagacious. Each speculative story is followed by a professional essay illuminating the scientific underpinnings of the story and providing a new window into the cutting-edge knowledge about exploration for life in the universe.

SF STORIES BY: Eugen Bacon, Gregory Benford, Renan Bernardo, Jana Bianchi, Tobias S. Buckell, Eric Choi, Julie E. Czerneda, Tessa Fisher, Simone Heller, Valentin D. Ivanov, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lisa Jenny Krieg (translated by Simone Heller), Geoffrey A. Landis, Rich Larson, Liu Yang (translated by Ladon Gao), Lucie Luka?ovi?ová, Premee Mohamed, G. David Nordley, Malka Older, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Tomáš Petrásek, Brian Rappatta, Arula Ratnakar, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Bogi Takács, Peter Watts, and B. Zelkovich.

SCIENCE ESSAYS BY: Jacques Arnould, William Bains, José A. Caballero, Dimitra Demertzi, Martina Dimoska, Tessa Fisher, Dennis Höning, Valentin D. Ivanov, Fabian Klenner, Nina Kopacz, Geoffrey A. Landis, Natuschka Lee, Ania Losiak, Stephen Francis Mann, Connor Martini, Tony Milligan, Philippe Nauny, Julie Nováková, Erik Persson, Tomáš Petrásek, Joanna Piotrowska, Giovanni Poggiali, Amedeo Romagnolo, Stefano Sandrelli, Floris van der Tak, Jan Toman, Sheri Wells-Jensen, and Raymond M. Wheeler.

Introduction by Stephen Baxter

About Julie Novakova: Julie Novakova (*1991) is an award-winning Czech author of science fiction and detective stories. She published seven novels, one anthology, one story collection and over thirty short pieces in Czech. Her work in English has appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog and elsewhere, and has been reprinted e.g. in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019. Some of her works have been translated into Chinese, Romanian, Estonian, Filipino, German, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Portuguese, and she acts as a translator of Czech stories into English (in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, F&SF). She edited an anthology of Czech speculative fiction in translation, titled Dreams From Beyond, an anthology of astrobiological SF stories Strangest of All (for the European Astrobiology Institute), and co-edited a book of European SF in Filipino translation, titled Haka, together with the former Czech ambassador in the Philippines, Jaroslav Olša, Jr. Most recently, she has co-edited an anthology titled Life Beyond Us (upcoming in April 2023), taking the readers on a journey through space, time and strange life in 27 SF stories accompanied by 27 science essays.

Julie is a recipient of the European fandom’s Encouragement Award and multiple Czech national genre awards. She’s also active in science outreach, education and nonfiction writing, and leads the outreach working group of the European Astrobiology Institute. She is a PhD candidate in evolutionary biology at the Charles University and likes to write popular science articles about fields ranging from behavioral science to planetary dynamics for Clarkesworld, Analog and other media. She is a member of the XPRIZE Sci-fi Advisory Council.

About Susan Forest: Susan Forest writes science fiction, fantasy and horror, and is the author of Aurora Award-winning Bursts of Fire (2019) and Flights of Marigold, (2020).

Susan’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and OnSPEC Magazine, among others. Her collection of short fiction, Immunity to Strange Tales, was published by Five Rivers Press, and her nonfiction has appeared in Legacy Magazine, Alberta Views Magazine, and several blogs. Her short stories, “The Only Road,” “Back,” “Turning It Off,” “The Gift,” and “For a Rich Man to Enter” were finalists for the Prix Aurora Award, and her novella, Lucy, won the Galaxy Project, juried by Robert Silverberg, David Drake and Barry Malzburg.

The third novel of her seven-volume Addicted to Heaven series, Gathering of Ghosts (forthcoming, 2023), confronts issues of addictions in an epic fantasy world of intrigue and betrayal. She is currently working on Book 4 of the series, Rivers of Ivy, and an Alberta Foundation for the Arts-funded standalone fantasy thriller, The Shadow Spy’s Wife.

Susan is a painter and visual artist whose landscapes have been displayed as part of the Stampede Western Showcase in Calgary, Alberta.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 577-With Life Beyond Us’s Julie Novakova and Susan Forest appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome S.B. Divya, author of MERU.

About MERU: For five centuries, human life has been restricted to Earth, while posthuman descendants called alloys freely explore the galaxy. But when the Earthlike planet of Meru is discovered, two unlikely companions venture forth to test the habitability of this unoccupied new world and the future of human-alloy relations.

For Jayanthi, the adopted human child of alloy parents, it’s an opportunity to rectify the ancient reputation of her species as avaricious and destructive, and to give humanity a new place in the universe. For Vaha, Jayanthi’s alloy pilot, it’s a daunting yet irresistible adventure to find success as an individual.

As the journey challenges their resolve in unexpected ways, the two form a bond that only deepens with their time alone on Meru. But how can Jayanthi succeed at freeing humanity from its past when she and Vaha have been set up to fail?

Against all odds, hope is human, too.

About S.B. Divya: S.B. Divya (she/any) is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. She is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Meru and Machinehood. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she is a former editor of Escape Pod, the weekly science fiction podcast. Divya holds degrees in Computational Neuroscience and Signal Processing. She worked for twenty years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author. Born in Pondicherry, India, Divya now resides in Southern California with her spouse, child, and two fur babies. She enjoys subverting expectations and breaking stereotypes whenever she can.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 576-With S.B. Divya appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Steve Scearce and Bear Weiter from the Station 151 Podcast.

About Station 151: Located on Alexander Island, Antarctica, Station 151 is the southernmost continent’s first and only astronomical radio observatory. Built by the Telders Corporation at an estimated cost of $200M USD, Station 151 is comprised of 50 radio antennas arrayed in a spiral configuration. Astrophysicist Wayne Robertson was hired by The Telders Corporation as the sole operator of Station 151, Antarctica for a 12-month pilot to test the station’s cutting-edge radio interferometer. Leaving behind his fiancé in the States, Wayne travels alone to Antarctica to fulfill a lifelong dream to peer deeper into the universe than ever thought possible. But after arriving at the station, Wayne’s hopes of a career defining role are dashed as he is thrust into a strange and unsettling new world.

The Station 151 audio drama podcast was written and developed by Andy Scearce and Steven James Scearce and is produced by Pale Matter Productions and Bear Weiter. You can listen to the Station 151 Podcast on all popular podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you can follow Station 151 on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. For a deeper dive and even more goodies, as well as exclusive content, you can support Station 151 on Patreon.

About Steve Scearce: Steven James Scearce is a writer, voice actor, and one of the creators of the speculative science fiction web series Unknown Transmission. He is also a contributor to the companion series Station 151. His printed work appears in a number of anthologies including Rigor Amortis and Cthulhurotica. Mr. Scearce has just completed work on his first novel-length manuscript, a supernatural horror story called Cottonwood.

About Bear Weiter: Bear Weiter is an illustrator, animator, podcast producer, and writer. He’s also the art director for Monte Cook Games, where he oversees the visual design and production of the various tabletop roleplaying games, crowdfunding campaigns, and more. His fiction appears in a number of magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Atomic Age Cthulhu, and LORE. You can follow him on Twitter @bearthw. He lives in the suburbs of Kansas City.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 575-With Station 151’s Steve Scearce and Bear Weiter appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Moses Ose Utomi, author of THE LIES OF THE AJUNGO.

About THE LIES OF THE AJUNGO: They say there is no water in the City of Lies. They say there are no heroes in the City of Lies. They say there are no friends beyond the City of Lies. But would you believe what they say in the City of Lies?

In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn thirteen, to appease the terrifying Ajungo Empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be thirteen in three days, but his parched mother won’t last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal: she provides water for his mother, and in exchange he will travel out into the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus begins Tutu’s quest for the salvation of his mother, his city, and himself.

About Moses Ose Utomi: Moses Ose Utomi wrote his first book when he was 5. It was a book about warrior bunnies from Mars, and the only copy is owned by his mother.

Since then, he has gone on to write many more, slightly better stories. He primarily writes fantasy “but with the plot and pacing of a psychological thriller” and his fiction often grows out of the West African culture and mythology he was raised in as a Nigerian American.

He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing as well as a Certificate in Book Publishing, and he has short fiction in various publications. Most notably, he is the author of the young adult fantasy novel Daughters of Oduma and the adult fantasy novella trilogy that begins with The Lies of the Ajungo.

He is also a martial arts, karaoke, and obscure sports addict.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 574-Moses Ose Utomi appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Aliette de Bodard, author of The Red Scholar’s Wake.

About The Red Scholar’s Wake: Xích Si: bot maker, data analyst, mother, scavenger. But those days are over now-her ship has just been captured by the Red Banner pirate fleet, famous for their double-dealing and cruelty. Xích Si expects to be tortured to death-only for the pirates’ enigmatic leader, Rice Fish, to arrive with a different and shocking proposition: an arranged marriage between Xích Si and herself.

Rice Fish: sentient ship, leader of the infamous Red Banner pirate fleet, wife of the Red Scholar. Or at least, she was the latter before her wife died under suspicious circumstances. Now isolated and alone, Rice Fish wants Xích Si’s help to find out who struck against them and why. Marrying Xích Si means Rice Fish can offer Xích Si protection, in exchange for Xích Si’s technical fluency: a business arrangement with nothing more to it.

But as the investigation goes on, Rice Fish and Xích Si find themselves falling for each other. As the interstellar war against piracy intensifies and the five fleets start fighting each other, they will have to make a stand-and to decide what kind of future they have together…

About Aliette de Bodard: Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She has won three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award, a British Fantasy Award and five British Science Fiction Association Awards.

She is the author of the lesbian space pirates romance The Red Scholar’s Wake (Gollancz/JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc, 2022), and of Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances (JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc), a fantasy of manners and murders set in an alternate 19th Century Vietnamese court. She also wrote Fireheart Tiger (Tor.com, 2021 BSFA Award winner), a sapphic romantic fantasy inspired by pre colonial Vietnam, where a diplomat princess must decide the fate of her country, and her own.

Her space opera books include The Tea Master and the Detective (2018 Nebula Award winner, 2018 British Fantasy Award winner, 2019 Hugo Award finalist).

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 573-With Aliette de Bodard appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome David R. Slayton, author of White Trash Warlock, Trailer Park Trickster and available for pre-order now, Deadbeat Druid.

About White Trash Warlock: Not all magicians go to schools of magic.

Adam Binder has the Sight. It’s a power that runs in his bloodline: the ability to see beyond this world and into another, a realm of magic populated by elves, gnomes, and spirits of every kind. But for much of Adam’s life, that power has been a curse, hindering friendships, worrying his backwoods family, and fueling his abusive father’s rage.

Years after his brother, Bobby, had him committed to a psych ward, Adam is ready to come to grips with who he is, to live his life on his terms, to find love, and maybe even use his magic to do some good. Hoping to track down his missing father, Adam follows a trail of cursed artifacts to Denver, only to discover that an ancient and horrifying spirit has taken possession of Bobby’s wife.

It isn’t long before Adam becomes the spirit’s next target. To survive the confrontation, save his sister-in-law, and learn the truth about his father, Adam will have to risk bargaining with very dangerous beings … including his first love.

About David R. Slayton: David R. Slayton grew up in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where finding fantasy novels was pretty challenging and finding fantasy novels with diverse characters was downright impossible. Now he lives in Denver, Colorado and writes the books he always wanted to read.

David’s debut, White Trash Warlock, was published in October 2020 by Blackstone Publishing and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Book two in the series, Trailer Park Trickster was released in October 2021. Book three, Deadbeat Druid, will be released in October 2022.

He is represented by the Seymour Agency.

In addition to writing, David is a regular presenter and speaker on writing. He has appeared on panels at Fan Expo Denver and taught workshops at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, the League of Utah Writers Quills Conference, and the Seymour Agency Winter Retreat. He also regularly speaks to library, college, and high school audiences.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 572-With David R. Slayton appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Seanan McGuire, author of Lost in the Moment and Found.

About Lost in the Moment and Found: Welcome to the Shop Where the Lost Things Go.

If you ever lost a sock, you’ll find it here.

Antoinette has lost her father. Metaphorically. He’s not in the Shop, and she’ll never see him again. But when Antsy finds herself lost (literally, this time), she discovers that however many doors open for her, leaving the Shop for good might not be as simple as it sounds.

And stepping through those doors exacts a price.

Lost in the Moment and Found tells us that childhood and innocence, once lost, can never be found.

About Seanan McGuire: Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite.

Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan’s anecdotes end with things like “and then we got the anti-venom” or “but it’s okay, because it turned out the water wasn’t that deep.” She has yet to be defeated in a game of “Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?,” and can be amused for hours by almost anything. “Almost anything” includes swamps, long walks, long walks in swamps, things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality TV, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using Kenneth Muir’s Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist.

Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn’t enough, she also writes under the pseudonym “Mira Grant.” For details on her work as Mira, check out MiraGrant.com.

In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music. She is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, “With Friends Like These…”, as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie with the words “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe she doesn’t sleep.

Seanan lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life.

Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the “marginally.” It probably doesn’t help that she has so many hobbies.

Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2023 Patrick Hester

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