The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Wendy and Richard Pini, co-creators of ElfQuest.

About The ElfQuest Audio Movie: When a fierce tribe of woodland elves – the Wolfriders – are burned from their homes by hostile humans, their chief, Cutter, must tap every reserve of strength and will to lead his people to safety.

Barely surviving brutal setbacks, the Wolfriders discover to their astonishment other elves – the Sun Folk – who exist in the world they thought was theirs alone.

Now refugees, the hardship of losing their forest home proves small compared to the spirit-twisting trials that follow when Cutter experiences an unexpected soul-to-soul bond with the healer of the Sun Folk, Leetah.

Join us as the Wolfriders confront danger, death, and desperate flight as they wrestle with deep mysteries of identity and love.

Welcome, as Realm presents the epic saga ElfQuest from comic book creators Wendy and Richard Pini in this richly layered audio movie, directed by Fred Greenhalgh. Starring Cree Summer, Alejandro Saab, Osric Chau, Amber Benson, Aaron Douglas, Clare Kramer, Will Friedle, Zehra Fazal, Robert Picardo, Tim Russ, Ray Porter, and a full cast.

Produced by Dagaz Media, Bluejay Atlantic, Wolfrider Productions, in association with The Fantasy Network.

About Wendy and Richard Pini: Born in San Francisco in 1951, Wendy Pini grew up in Gilroy, CA. Largely self taught, her artistic talents were influenced by turn-of-the-century illustrators, film and TV animation, Shakespeare, Japanese history, fairy tales, myths and modern fantasy. Wendy began exhibiting her artwork at sci-fi conventions in the mid 1960s, garnering awards and recognition.

In 1972 she married Richard Pini, and in 1974 began her professional career as an illustrator for SF magazines such as “Galaxy” and “Worlds of If.” Through the mid-1970s, Wendy also trod the boards at comic conventions as actress/dancer in “The Red Sonja and the Wizard Show.” This led to her first professional comics work, writing an issue of “Red Sonja” for Marvel Comics.

In 1977 Wendy and Richard co-founded Warp Graphics, and the following year ELFQUEST was born. Widely regarded as the “first American manga,” ElfQuest continues to be a publishing phenomenon as well as an inspiration to its readers. Tens of millions of copies of comics, graphic novels, books, calendars and other merchandise have been sold worldwide.

Wendy has worked for nearly all the major comics publishers such as Marvel, First Comics, Comico, DC Comics and, most recently, Dark Horse Comics. She wrote and painted two critically acclaimed graphic novels based on the hit TV series “Beauty and the Beast,” and supplied the text and illustrations for “Law and Chaos,” an art book inspired by the writings of Michael Moorcock.

In 1997 Wendy had the privilege of designing the elfin mascot and mission patch for NASA’s Enclosed Laminar Flames (ELF) investigation, an experiment performed in space by members of the crew of Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-87).

From 2007 to 2010, Wendy took a walk on the dark side to produce her adults-only graphic novel based on the classic Edgar Allan Poe horror story “Masque of the Red Death.” Her animated web comic received millions of views, and the book is currently available as a limited edition, 400 page hardcover volume from Warp Graphics.

In 2012, Wendy and Richard donated her entire body of work to the Comic Book and Graphic Novel archive at Columbia University, New York City. Her artwork and writings will be permanently available to students and the public for study.

Richard Pini was born in 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), receiving a degree in astronomy and astrophysics. Always fan of science fiction, at college he found new diversion in comic books, and it was in the letters pages of “The Silver Surfer” in 1969 that he chanced upon a letter written by one Wendy Fletcher.

A correspondence began, spanning a period of four years. The two eventually married in 1972, and Wendy embarked upon a career as an illustrator for sci-fi magazines. Speaking of Richard, Wendy states “When Richard and I first met, a lot of things fell in place for me. Almost immediately we began working on our life together – it was almost preordained. Richard and I have a lot to accomplish in this lifetime.”

His degree in astronomy from MIT led Richard to a position at Boston’s Hayden Planetarium as lecturer, photographer, script writer, and special effects technician.

From 2015 to 2017, Richard wrote or co-wrote, and worked closely with Flesk Publications (a producer of high-quality art books) to bring out three ElfQuest/Wendy-related titles: “The Art of ElfQuest,” “ElfQuest – the Art of the Story,” and “Line of Beauty – The Art of Wendy Pini,” which was nominated for a Comic-Con International Eisner Award (the comic book industry equivalent of the Academy Awards) in 2018.

In 2019, both Wendy and Richard were inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame for their lifetime achievements.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 560-With Wendy and Richard Pini appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Veronica Roth, author of POSTER GIRL.

About POSTER GIRL: WHAT’S RIGHT IS RIGHT. Sonya Kantor knows this slogan—she lived by it for most of her life. For decades, everyone in the Seattle-Portland megalopolis lived under it, as well as constant surveillance in the form of the Insight, an ocular implant that tracked every word and every action, rewarding or punishing by a rigid moral code set forth by the Delegation.

About Veronica Roth: VERONICA ROTH is the New York Times best-selling author of Chosen Ones, the short story collection The End and Other Beginnings, the Divergent series, and the Carve the Mark duology. She is also the guest editor of the most recent The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 559-With Veronica Roth appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, author of Glorious Fiends and Where You Linger.

About Glorious Fiends: When infamous hot mess vampire Roxanne resurrects her deceased best friends, she’s confronted by a dream-dwelling Guardian of the Underworld, who demands that she replace them in his afterlife with three equally nefarious creatures—or he’ll drag her there instead.

Reunited with Medusa and Mx. Hyde, Roxanne and her macabre girl gang must become monster hunters themselves and fight for the future of their friendship.

About Where You Linger: Bones of extinct species wander a campground, stalking a group of friends in love with the same woman. The object of their affection seeks solace with a couple in a world with rain that kills. A woman moves away from her repressed home town, only to transform into a man-eating monster when she returns. A robot assassin avenges women ruined by capitalism.

Journey to the liminal space with acclaimed author Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam where interconnected stories span from past to future among the dead and the living.

About Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam: Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in over 90 magazines and anthologies. She’s been nominated for a Nebula Award, and her debut novella and story collection released in 2022.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 558-With Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Erin M. Evans, author of EMPIRE OF EXILES.

About EMPIRE OF EXILES: Twenty-seven years ago, a Duke with a grudge led a ruthless coup against the empire of Semilla, killing thousands. He failed. The Duke was executed, a terrifyingly powerful sorcerer was imprisoned, and an unwilling princess disappeared.

The empire moved on.

Now, when Quill, an apprentice scribe, arrives in the capital city, he believes he’s on a simple errand for another pompous noble: fetch ancient artifacts from the magical Imperial Archives. He’s always found his apprenticeship to a lawman to be dull work. But these aren’t just any artifacts — these are the instruments of revolution, the banners under which the Duke lead his coup.

Just as the artifacts are unearthed, the city is shaken by a brutal murder that seems to have been caused by a weapon not seen since the days of rebellion. With Quill being the main witness to the murder, and no one in power believing his story, he must join the Archivists — a young mage, a seasoned archivist, and a disillusioned detective — to solve the truth of the attack. And what they uncover will be the key to saving the empire – or destroying it again.

About Erin M. Evans: Erin M. Evans is the author of seven Forgotten Realms novels for Wizards of the Coast, including the 2011 Scribe Award winner Brimstone Angels. She is a content designer for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms and a cast member of the D&D actual play Dungeon Scrawlers. Erin lives in the Seattle area with her husband and sons.

Her latest series, Books of the Usurper, begins with Exile of Empires, coming November 2022 from Orbit.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 557-With Erin M. Evans appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot.

About Thistlefoot: The Yaga siblings—Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street performer and con artist—have been estranged since childhood, separated both by resentment and by wide miles of American highway. But when they learn that they are to receive an inheritance, the siblings agree to meet—only to discover that their bequest isn’t land or money, but something far stranger: a sentient house on chicken legs.

Thistlefoot, as the house is called, has arrived from the Yagas’ ancestral home outside Kyiv—but not alone. A sinister figure known only as the Longshadow Man has tracked it to American shores, bearing with him violent secrets from the past: fiery memories that have hidden in Isaac and Bellatine’s blood for generations. As the Yaga siblings embark with Thistlefoot on a final cross-country tour of their family’s traveling theater show, the Longshadow Man follows in relentless pursuit, seeding destruction in his wake. Ultimately, time, magic, and legacy must collide—erupting in a powerful conflagration to determine who gets to remember the past and craft a new future.

About GennaRose Nethercott: GENNAROSE NETHERCOTT is the author of the novel THISTLEFOOT (Knopf Anchor/PRH 2022) and The Lumberjack’s Dove (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018), selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her other recent projects include the narrative song collection Modern Ballads, and Lianna Fled the Cranberry Bog: A Story in Cootie Catchers (Ninepin Press 2019). A Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow, her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The American Scholar, PANK, and elsewhere, and she has been a writer-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, Art Farm Nebraska, and the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris.

Nethercott tours nationally and internationally performing from her works (often with a hand-cranked shadow show in tow) and composing poems-to-order for strangers on a 1952 Hermes Rocket typewriter. She is the founder of the Traveling Poetry Emporium, a team of poets-for-hire, and is an Associate Producer at Grim and Mild, where she conducts supernatural and historical research for the podcast Lore. She lives in the woodlands of Vermont, beside an old cemetery.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 556-With GennaRose Nethercott appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Mur Lafferty, author of STATION ETERNITY.

About STATION ETERNITY: Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove her to live on an alien space station, but her problems still follow her in this witty, self-aware novel that puts a speculative spin on murder mysteries, from the Hugo-nominated author of Six Wakes.

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet…and markedly devoid of homicide.

But when the station agrees to allow additional human guests, Mallory knows the break from her peculiar reality is over. After the first Earth shuttle arrives, and aliens and humans alike begin to die, the station is thrown into peril. Stuck smack-dab in the middle of an extraterrestrial whodunit, and wondering how in the world this keeps happening to her anyway, Mallory has to solve the crime—and fast—or the list of victims could grow to include everyone on board…

About Mur Lafferty: Mur Lafferty is a podcaster and writer from Durham, NC. She made her name with podcasting (I Should Be Writing, The Angry Robot Podcast, and Escape Pod, the premier SF podcast magazine) and has written for magazines, roleplaying games, and audio and video podcasts.

She’s the author of I Should Be Writing, Six Wakes, The Shambling Guides, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Station Eternity and part of the team that writes Bookburners. Mur is a Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick award finalist/nominee. She won the 2018 Best Fancast Hugo Award for her Podcast Ditch Digers, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (Formerly Campbell Award), the Manly Wade Wellman Award (2014 & 2015) for The Shambling Guides 1 & 2, and was the Inaugural inductee into the Podcast Academy Hall of Fame.

Her nonfiction essays have appeared in Knights of the Dinner Table, and on the podcast The Dragon Page.

She lives in Durham, NC, with her husband, a college student, and a dog who threatens to love them to death.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 555-With Mur Lafferty appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Alix E. Harrow, author of A Mirror Mended.

About A Mirror Mended: Zinnia Gray, professional fairy-tale fixer and lapsed Sleeping Beauty is over rescuing snoring princesses. Once you’ve rescued a dozen damsels and burned fifty spindles, once you’ve gotten drunk with twenty good fairies and made out with one too many members of the royal family, you start to wish some of these girls would just get a grip and try solving their own narrative issues.

Just when Zinnia’s beginning to think she can’t handle one more princess, she glances into a mirror and sees another face looking back at her: the shockingly gorgeous face of evil, asking for her help. Because there’s more than one person trapped in a story they didn’t choose. Snow White’s Evil Queen has found out how her story ends and she’s desperate for a better ending. She wants Zinnia to help her before it’s too late for everyone.

Will Zinnia accept the Queen’s poisonous request, and save them both from the hot iron shoes that wait for them, or will she try another path?

About Alix E. Harrow: A former academic and adjunct, Alix E. Harrow is a NYT-bestselling and Hugo-award winning writer living in Virginia with her husband and their two semi-feral kids. She is the author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches, and various short fiction.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 554-With Alix E. Harrow appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Valerie Valdes, author of FAULT TOLERANCE.

About FAULT TOLERANCE: Nothing wrecks Captain Eva Innocente’s vacation plans quite like an anonymous threat to vaporize billions of people. Hundreds of monoliths have suddenly materialized in space, broadcasting the same looped message: surrender or be exterminated. Is the universe being epically spammed?

Surrender to whom? Exterminated when? And how is Eva, commander of a beat-up cargo ship, supposed to prevent it? As panic spreads, a mystery message sends Eva to find answers, in a system that hasn’t been explored in all of recorded history.

With the crew of La Sirena Negra, a score of psychic cats, a feline-phobic robot, and a superweapon she has no clue how to use, Eva prepares to battle the unknown. But first, she has to defeat the known: mercenary Tito Santiago, whose idea of a clean fight is a shower before kill time. His mission is to ensure Eva doesn’t succeed at hers.

If anything goes wrong, the universe is doomed. But if everything goes according to Eva’s plans—wait, when does that ever happen?

About Valerie Valdes: Valerie Valdes’s short fiction and poetry has been featured in Uncanny Magazine, Time Travel Short Stories and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel Chilling Effect was published by Harper Voyager in September 2019 and Orbit UK in February 2020, with starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal. It was also named one of Library Journal’s best SF/fantasy novels of 2019, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The sequel, Prime Deceptions, was published in September 2020, and the third book in the trilogy, Fault Tolerance, is forthcoming in August 2022.

Valerie is co-editor of Escape Pod, and currently works as a freelance writer and copy editor. She attended the University of Miami, where she majored in English literature with minors in creative writing and motion pictures. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise and has taught classes and given lectures for Clarion West and Georgia State University, among others.

Valerie has served as a Municipal Liaison for National Novel Writing Month since 2005. In her spare time, she enjoys playing video games, watching cartoons and learning to sword fight. She lives in Georgia with her husband, children and cats.

Valerie is represented by Quressa Robinson at Folio Lit.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 553-With Valerie Valdes appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Rena Mason and Vince Liaguno, co-editors of Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology.

About Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology: Offering new stories from some of the biggest names in horror as well as some of the hottest up-and-coming talents, Other Terrors will provide the ultimate reading experience for horror fans who want to examine fear of “the other.”

Be they of a different culture, a different background, a different sexual orientation or gender identity, a different belief system, or a different skin color, some people simply aren’t part of the community’s majority—and are perceived as scary. Humans are almost instinctively inclined to fear what’s different, and there are a multitude of individuals who have spent far too long on the outside looking in. And the thing about the outside is . . . it’s much larger than you think.

In Other Terrors, horror writers from a multitude of underrepresented backgrounds have created stories of everyday people, places, and things where something shifts, striking a deeper, much more primal, chord of fear. Are our eyes playing tricks on us, or is there something truly sinister lurking under the surface of what we thought we knew? And who among us is really the other, after all?

CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Tananarive Due, Jennifer McMahon, S.A. Cosby, Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu, Michael Thomas Ford, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Christina Sng, Denise Dumars, Usman T. Malik, Annie Neugebauer, Gabino Iglesias, Hailey Piper, Nathan Carson, Shanna Heath, Tracy Cross, Linda D. Addison, Maxwell I. Gold, Larissa Glasser, Eugen Bacon, Holly Lyn Walrath, Jonathan Lees, M. E. Bronstein, Michael H. Hanson

About Rena Mason: Rena Mason is an American dark speculative fiction author of Thai-Chinese descent, and the Bram Stoker Award® winning author of The Evolutionist and “The Devil’s Throat”, as well as a 2014 Stage 32 / The Blood List Search for New Blood Quarter-Finalist.

She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, the Public Safety Writers Association, and the International Screenwriters’ Association.?

An avid scuba diver, she has traveled the world and enjoys incorporating the experiences into her stories. She currently resides on a lakefront in the Great Lakes State of Michigan.

About Vince Liaguno: Vince Liaguno is an award-winning writer, anthologist and editor, and an occasional poet.

Vince won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for UNSPEAKABLE HORROR: FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE CLOSET (Dark Scribe Press 2008), an anthology of queer horror fiction, which he co-edited with Chad Helder. His debut novel, 2006’s THE LITERARY SIX, was a tribute to the slasher films of the 80s and won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) for Horror and was named a finalist in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards in the Gay/Lesbian Fiction category.

Vince began writing professionally in 2005 for AUTOGRAPH, a national print magazine for enthusiasts of the titular hobby, where he remained an active contributor through 2009. In 2007, he launched DARK SCRIBE MAGAZINE, where he has remained Editor-in-Chief since the virtual magazine’s inception. His many profiles, interviews, and non-fiction pieces have included bestselling authors (Christopher Rice, Bentley Little, Tess Gerritsen, Chelsea Cain), award-winning actors (Julianne Moore, Kathy Bates, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meg Tilly), music artists (Cyndi Lauper, Terri Nunn of Berlin, the late Laura Branigan), and pop culture retrospectives on TV series such as MELROSE PLACE and WILL & GRACE. A complete list of Vince’s published work can be found here.

Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, raised in the Princeton area of New Jersey, he now calls the snowy mitten-shaped state of Michigan his home. He is a member — and former Secretary — of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC).

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 552-With Rena Mason and Vince Liaguno appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome R.A. Salvatore, author of Glacier’s Edge: A Novel (The Way of the Drow, 2).

About Glacier’s Edge: A Novel (The Way of the Drow, 2): There’s a lot that Jarlaxle doesn’t know: is he the lone survivor of the raid on the slaad fortress, can he even find a way to get out, and beyond his immediate predicament, could he possibly escape the ice caverns and get help for his friends?

However, what Jarlaxle does know is that if he plans to come back—if Catti-brie, Entreri, and Zaknafein are to have any hope of surviving—he’s going to have to bring back far more firepower. An army of aevendrow seems unlikely, so he must go home and pull together a team with great skill and unimaginable power.

But how will he get home? Will such a collection of warriors and mages come to his aid? And even if he manages all that, will it be enough? For Jarlaxle has seen the slaadi’s power and their god in a most personal and terrifying way.

Trapped in the ice while the world is on fire, Jarlaxle is in a race against time—and burdened with a magical secret—to save a peaceful city and his companions.

And he’s running out of tricks in his bag of holding…

About R.A. Salvatore: As one of the fantasy genre’s most successful authors, R.A. Salvatore enjoys an ever-expanding and tremendously loyal following.

His books regularly appear on The New York Times best-seller lists and have sold more than 30,000,000 copies. Salvatore’s most recent original hardcover, The Two Swords, Book III of The Hunter’s Blade Trilogy (October 2004) debuted at # 1 on The Wall Street Journal best-seller list and at # 4 on The New York Times best-seller list. His books have been translated into numerous foreign languages including German, Italian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Turkish, Croatian, Bulgarian, Yiddish, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Czech, and French.

Salvatore’s first published novel, The Crystal Shard from TSR in 1988, became the first volume of the acclaimed Icewind Dale Trilogy and introduced an enormously popular character, the dark elf Drizzt Do’Urden. Since that time, Salvatore has published numerous novels for each of his signature multi-volume series including The Dark Elf Trilogy, Paths of Darkness, The Hunter’s Blades Trilogy, and The Cleric Quintet.

His love affair with fantasy, and with literature in general, began during his sophomore year of college when he was given a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings as a Christmas gift. He promptly changed his major from computer science to journalism. He received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Communications from Fitchburg State College in 1981, then returned for the degree he always cherished, the Bachelor of Arts in English. He began writing seriously in 1982, penning the manuscript that would become Echoes of the Fourth Magic. Salvatore held many jobs during those first years as a writer, finally settling in (much to our delight) to write full time in 1990.

The R.A. Salvatore Collection has been established at his alma mater, Fitchburg State College in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, containing the writer’s letters, manuscripts, and other professional papers. He is in good company, as The Salvatore Collection is situated alongside The Robert Cormier Library, which celebrates the writing career of the co-alum and esteemed author of young adult books.

Salvatore is an active member of his community and is on the board of trustees at the local library in Leominster, Massachusetts. He has participated in several American Library Association regional conferences, giving talks on themes including “Adventure fantasy” and “Why young adults read fantasy.” Salvatore himself enjoys a broad range of literary writers including James Joyce, Mark Twain, Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, and Sartre. He counts among his favorite genre literary influences Ian Fleming, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fritz Leiber, and of course, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Born in 1959, Salvatore is a native of Massachusetts and resides there with his wife Diane, and their three children, Bryan, Geno, and Caitlin. The family pets include three Japanese Chins, Oliver, Artemis and Ivan, and four cats including Guenhwyvar.

When he isn’t writing, Salvatore chases after his three Japanese Chins, takes long walks, hits the gym, and coaches/plays on a fun-league softball team that includes most of his family. His gaming group still meets on Sundays to play.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 551-With R.A. Salvatore appeared first on The Functional Nerds.