The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Randee Dawn, author of TUNE IN TOMORROW.

About TUNE IN TOMORROW: She’s just a small town girl, with mythic-sized dreams.

Starr Weatherby came to New York to become… well, a star. But after ten years and no luck, she’s offered a big role – on a show no one has ever heard of. And there’s a reason for that. It’s a “reality” show beyond the Veil, human drama, performed for the entertainment of the Fae.

But as Starr shifts from astounded newcomer to rising fan favorite, she learns about the show’s dark underbelly – and mysterious disappearance of her predecessor. She’ll do whatever it takes to keep her dream job – though she might just bring down the show in the process.

About Randee Dawn: Randee Dawn is an author, journalist, and lucky denizen of Brooklyn. Her first novel, the humorous pop-culture fantasy Tune in Tomorrow, will be published in August 2022 (Solaris/Rebellion).

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 550-With Randee Dawn appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome nine-time Hugo Award winner Lynne Marie Thomas, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Magazine, Year 9: To Fifty … and Beyond!.

About Uncanny Magazine, Year 9: To Fifty … and Beyond!: Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas have run Kickstarters for the five-time Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine Years One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight. We promised to bring you stunning cover art, passionate science fiction and fantasy fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, and provocative nonfiction by writers from every conceivable background. Not to mention a fantastic award-winning podcast featuring exclusive content.

Through the hard work of our exceptional staff and contributors, Uncanny Magazine delivered on that promise every single year. Stories from Uncanny Magazine have been finalists or winners of Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards!

The Space Unicorn Ranger Corps, our name for the Uncanny Magazine community, made it possible for our remarkable staff and contributors to create this wonderful art for all of our readers via the web or as eBooks. THANK YOU, SPACE UNICORNS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to join or re-up with the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps, now’s your chance! We need your help to continue this mission for another year. This is your magazine, Space Unicorns! Let’s make Year Nine happen!

Though Uncanny continues to have multiple ways to support us, we still need the help of the Space Unicorn Kickstarter community to keep bringing you this amazing content.

YOUR support specifically makes it possible for us to make our fiction freely available on our website.

We have put together a fabulous lineup of solicited contributors for Year Nine!

About Lynne Marie Thomas: Nine-time Hugo Award winner Lynne M. Thomas is the Head of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the former Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, where she was responsible for popular culture special collections that include the literary papers of nearly 70 SF/F authors.

Lynne is the six-time Hugo and Parsec Award-winning co-publisher and co-editor-in-chief of Uncanny Magazine with her husband, Michael Damian Thomas. In this editorial role, they have also been finalists three times for the World Fantasy Award and finalists three times for the Locus Award. She was the co-editor of the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords (2010) with Tara O’Shea, Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them (2011) with Deborah Stanish, and the Hugo Award-nominated Chicks Dig Comics (2012) with Sigrid Ellis, all published by Mad Norwegian Press. Along with the Geek Girl Chronicles book series, Lynne was the former Editor-in-Chief (2011-2013) of the Hugo Award-nominated (2012 & 2013) Apex Magazine, an online professional prose and poetry magazine of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mash-ups of all three. She moderated the Hugo Award-winning SF Squeecast, a monthly podcast (with Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Michael Damian Thomas, and Catherynne M. Valente) in which a group of SF/F professionals get excited about stuff they like, and contributes to the Parsec Award-winning Verity! podcast (with Erika Ensign, L.M. Myles, Katrina Griffiths, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Deborah Stanish), where a bunch of smart women talk about Doctor Who.

Lynne lives in Champaign, IL, with her husband Michael and their daughter Caitlin. Caitlin has a rare congenital disorder called Aicardi syndrome, and Michael is her full-time caregiver and an advocate for disabled children.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 549-With Lynne Marie Thomas from Uncanny Magazine appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Ryan Van Loan, author of THE MEMORY IN THE BLOOD.

About THE MEMORY IN THE BLOOD: When her quest to destroy the Gods began, Buc was a child of the streets. Now she is a woman of steel, shaped by gaining and losing power, tempered by love and betrayal, and honed to a fine edge by grief and her desire for vengeance.

A perilous, clandestine mission to a hidden library uncovers information that is key to destroying both the Dead Gods and their enemy, the Goddess Ciris. Ciris’s creation, Sin, who lives inside Buc, gives her superhuman abilities and tempts her with hints of even greater power. With that power, she could achieve almost anything?end the religious war tearing her world apart, remake society at a stroke?but the price would be the betrayal of everything she has fought for . . . and the man she loved would still be dead.

In the middle of this murderous, magical maelstrom, a coded message smuggled out of the heart of the Dead Gods’ cathedral reveals that the Dead Gods intend to destroy Ciris?and much of the world with her.

This. Will. Not. Stand.

If Buc has to destroy all Gods, eat the rich, and break the world’s economy to save the people, she will do it. Even if it costs her everything.

About Ryan Van Loan: Ryan Van Loan is an up and coming Science Fiction and Fantasy author. He started reading his Grandfather’s Reader’s Digest when he was four years old. Soon after, he read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer before eventually discovering science fiction and fantasy through the works of Robin McKinley, Robert Jordan, Stephen King and many more. He moved around a lot in his childhood from Montana to Georgia to Puerto Rico before finally ending up in Pennsylvania. Ryan served six years as a Sergeant in the United States Army Infantry (PA National Guard) where he served on the front lines of Afghanistan. All of that travel got into his blood and Ryan has traveled around the world with his wife, wandering Caribbean island haunts, exploring the palaces and cathedrals of Europe, and hiking with elephants in the rain forests of Southeast Asia. When he’s not traveling Ryan enjoys hiking, soccer (football), tabletop gaming, weightlifting (with his personal best coming from deadlifting three times his body weight), and all things culinary. Ryan’s debut novel, The Sin in the Steel (Tor Books), Book One in the Fall of the Gods series came out on July 21, 2020. Today, Ryan lives in northeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two dogs where he’s hard at work on his next novel.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 548-With Ryan Van Loan appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Blake Crouch, author of UPGRADE.

About UPGRADE: At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything’s different. He just feels a little… sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep.

But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him—even those he loves most—in whole new ways.

The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy.

Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large—at a terrifying cost.

Because of his new abilities, Logan’s the one person in the world capable of stopping what’s been set in motion. But to have a chance at winning this war, he’ll have to become something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.

And even as he’s fighting, he can’t help wondering: what if humanity’s only hope for a future really does lie in engineering our own evolution?

About Blake Crouch: Blake is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of a dozen novels, most recently, Dark Matter, Recursion, and Upgrade, for which he is also writing the movie for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners. His international-bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy was adapted into a television series for FOX, executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, that was Summer 2015’s #1 show. With Chad Hodge, Crouch also created Good Behavior, the TNT show starring Michelle Dockery based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. His novel, Recursion, is currently being developed as a Netflix series by Shonda Rhimes and Matt Reeves, and Skydance is developing a film adaptation of his novella, Summer Frost, based on Crouch’s script. His novels have been translated into forty languages and his short fiction has appeared in numerous publications including Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and Cemetery Dance. At the moment, Crouch is writing a new book and creating a nine-episode adaptation of his novel Dark Matter, for Apple TV+. Blake lives in Colorado.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 547-With Blake Crouch appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Ava Reid, author of Juniper & Thorn.

About Juniper & Thorn: A gruesome curse. A city in upheaval. A monster with unquenchable appetites.

Marlinchen and her two sisters live with their wizard father in a city shifting from magic to industry. As Oblya’s last true witches, she and her sisters are little more than a tourist trap as they treat their clients with archaic remedies and beguile them with nostalgic charm. Marlinchen spends her days divining secrets in exchange for rubles and trying to placate her tyrannical, xenophobic father, who keeps his daughters sequestered from the outside world. But at night, Marlinchen and her sisters sneak out to enjoy the city’s amenities and revel in its thrills, particularly the recently established ballet theater, where Marlinchen meets a dancer who quickly captures her heart.

As Marlinchen’s late-night trysts grow more fervent and frequent, so does the threat of her father’s rage and magic. And while Oblya flourishes with culture and bustles with enterprise, a monster lurks in its midst, borne of intolerance and resentment and suffused with old-world power. Caught between history and progress and blood and desire, Marlinchen must draw upon her own magic to keep her city safe and find her place within it.

About Ava Reid: Ava Reid was born in Manhattan and raised right across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey, but currently lives in Palo Alto. She has a degree in political science from Barnard College, focusing on religion and ethnic nationalism.

She is the author of The Wolf And The Woodsman, Juniper & Thorn, + A Study In Drowning (fall 2023).

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 546-With Ava Reid appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Laura J. Mixon, author of UP AGAINST IT.

About UP AGAINST IT: Jane Navio is the resource manager of Phoecea, an asteroid colony poised on the knife-edge of a hard vacuum of unforgiving space. A mishap has dumped megatons of water and methane out the colony’s air lock, putting the entire human population at risk.

Jane discovers that the crisis may have been engineered by the Martian crime syndicate, as a means of executing a coup that will turn Phocaea into a client-state. And if that wasn’t bad enough, an AI that spawned during the emergency has gone rogue…and there’s a giant x-factor in the form of the transhumanist Viridian cult that lives in Phocaea’s bowels.

Jane’s in the prime of her career?she’s only a bit over a century old?but the conflict between politics and life-support is tearing her apart. To save her colony and her career, she’s going to have to solve several mysteries at once?a challenge that will put her up against all the difficulties, contradictions, and awkward compromises entailed in the human colonization of outer space.

About Laura J. Mixon: Who is Laura J. Mixon?

A nerd. An environmental engineer with a master of science in sustainability management, and over 35 years of experience providing environmental and information management services to industry and government.

They have done auditing and investigative work on pollution sources. They’ve designed apps and managed rollout of integrated management systems to track pollutant emissions and reduce landfill waste, and water and energy use. With game designer Chris Crawford, They co-founded a game company and worked with him to create Storytron*, an interactive storytelling tool. They believe that it, or its successors, will some day transform the nature of storytelling. (Think Baby Holodeck.)

They’re also a science fiction writer: a spinner of far-flung tales—stories of interstellar travel, planetary disasters, spaceships, rogue AI’s, planet-eating machines, sentient tumors… and the people who struggle to survive on the fringes of the world. They have six books out, as well as a handful of shorter works.

They’re a chronically-ill, genderqueer, bisexual, intersectional feminist and environmentalist. A motherbeast and a spouse. A nature lover and green-chile eater, who discovered science fiction at the age of eleven and never looked back.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 545-With Laura J. Mixon appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Ian Brazee-Cannon, author of The Courtship of Georgie and Armand: A M/M fantasy gay shifter romance.

About The Courtship of Georgie and Armand: A M/M fantasy gay shifter romance: This is the story of how Georgie and Armand, the shape-shifting, master mage dragons who run an interdimensional hotel, met, fought, fell in love and found themselves in an epic magic battle for the sake of all reality. It is a tale that stretches out across decades as the two meet, meet again and then a third time, linking their destinies together, developing a unique relationship that will stand up to the test of time like no other.

Their love story doesn’t just break the rules of romance, it recreates them.

About Ian Brazee-Cannon: Ian was a story teller from a young age, always being involved in assorted creative endeavors. He is a writer, filmmaker, game designer and podcaster. Over a dozen of his short stories have seen publication. ‘The Fifth Di…’, ‘Wondrous Web Worlds’, ‘Forgotten Worlds’, ‘Tales of the Talisman’ and various anthologies have featured his works. He has worked with Nomadic Delirium Press on supplements for the Ephemeris RPG. You can hear him discuss all manner of subjects as one of the founders and regular co-hosts on the Amateur Skeptics podcast. Dangling Carrot Films, Running Riot Productions and Ijin Studios have made use of him as a writer, director, producer and editor on their projects. In some manner of warping time, he is able to find a way to participate in other hobbies and raise two young boys. His collections of books, comic books, action figures and more dominate his office and basement. Regulars at the various Denver area sci-fi conventions will often find him involved in the programming there.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 544-With Ian Brazee-Cannon appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Boyd and Beth Morrison, co-authors of THE LAWLESS LAND.

About THE LAWLESS LAND: Canterbury, 1351.

Ex-communicated knight Gerard Fox is a battle-hardened warrior whose ancestral home was unjustly taken from him. Now, he roams across the known world of Europe looking for work as a man-at-arms. Equipped with only his Damascus-steel sword and war bow, Fox takes out tyrannical and dishonorable men in a land still blighted by the Black Death.

In his ongoing crusade to deliver justice, Fox comes to the aid of Lady Isabel, who is fleeing from her brutal betrothed. But she hasn’t told him the whole story. Isabel is guarding a priceless holy relic. One many men would kill for.

Fox and Isabel soon find they are being chased across the continent and try to evade those who seek the relic. But as more assassins close in, Fox realizes they will stop at nothing to possess the sacred treasure that Isabel has sworn to protect…

About Boyd Morrison: Boyd Morrison is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twelve thrillers, including six collaborations with Clive Cussler in the Oregon Files adventure series. His first novel, The Ark, was an Indie Next Notable pick and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has a PhD in industrial engineering from Virginia Tech.

About Beth Morrison: Beth Morrison is Senior Curator of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum. A leader in her field, she has curated several major exhibitions, including ‘Imagining the Past in France, 1250-1500,’ and ‘Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World’. She has a PhD in the History of Art from Cornell University. She lives in Los Angeles.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 543-With Boyd and Beth Morrison appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy are celebrating Tracy’s 100th episode with questions and comments from Patrons, anecdotes, stories and more.

You can also check out Tracy’s 1st episode!

No picks this week, but we’ll be back with not one, but TWO guests next week…!

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Heste

The post Episode 542-Just Us and Tracy’s 100th Episode appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Elaine Isaak aka E. C. Ambrose, author of DRAKEMASTER.

About DRAKEMASTER: What connects an ancient map carved in a cane, a disgraced descendant of Chinggis Khan, and a secret Chinese society?

1257 AD, Kaifeng, China: Dailus, a European bronzecaster taken as a slave by the Mongols, builds mighty siege cannons for the Khan, but discovers there are even more frightening weapons. His fate intersects that of the Mongolian scout who enslaved him desperate to remove the name of ‘traitor’, the last warrior monk of a ruined temple, a Chinese astronomer’s daughter forced to suppress her mind to her beauty, and a dancer whose grace hides deadly skills: allies and opponents in a race across medieval China to locate a clockwork doomsday device. As cities fall and empires are threatened, this legendary device could turn the tide of battle, or burn the world to ash with the power of the stars.

An epic historical fantasy novel from the author of “The King of Next Week”, The Dark Apostle and Bone Guard series.

About Elaine Isaak aka E. C. Ambrose: Author and editor Elaine Isaak credits first grade teacher Mrs. Krackhardt for nurturing an early enthusiasm for reading by allowing her to stay inside and read during recess—and she hasn’t looked back! She withdrew from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was studying sculpture, to pursue her own interests in business and writing. She had a brief stint at a catalog company phone bank, which she highly recommends as a spur to getting your own business off the ground! Her interest in sewing three-dimensional design led her to work as an animal mascot creator, including one year in which she made over a dozen Easter rabbit costumes. For over a decade, she owned Curious Characters, creating original design stuffed animals and playful desktop sculptures, before finally devoting herself wholly to her writing.

In addition to the many novels detailed on the Rocinante Books site, her stories have appeared in anthologies ranging from Warrior Women (Prime Books, 2016) to Fantasy for the Throne (Gray Rabbit, 2018). Her work also appeared in Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: Flush Fiction, which she hopes is a comment only on the readability and short duration of her flash stories. Under several names, she has published in and edited volumes of New Hampshire Pulp Fiction from Plaidswede including Love Free or Die, Live Free or Ride, about the venerable Concord Coach stagecoach, and Live Free or Dragons. She’s also written non-fiction for Clarkesworld and Writers’ Digest, and wrote the Lady Blade fantasy fiction column for Alien Skin magazine for three years.

Elaine is a graduate of, instructor at and critiquer for the Odyssey Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop. Her short stories have received notice in the Boskone Short Fiction Contest, Tenebris Press Flash Horror contest, and the Ray Bradbury Short Story Award. She has been honored to serve as a juror for the Philip K. Dick Award, and the World Fantasy Award. An acclaimed workshop leader and speaker, Elaine has addressed audiences and worked with writers as part of the World Fantasy and World Science Fiction Conventions, the New Hampshire Youth Writers’ Conference, the Bay Area Writers’ League, and the 603 Conference, as well as numerous writers’ groups. She has participated in the Library of Congress What-if? reading series, the New York Review of Science Fiction readings, and Boston Speculative Fiction.

Elaine lives in New Hampshire where she creates wearable art clothing when she isn’t climbing the walls at the rock gym.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2022 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 541-With Elaine Isaak aka E. C. Ambrose appeared first on The Functional Nerds.