The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Monica Byrne, author of THE ACTUAL STAR.

About THE ACTUAL STAR: The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents —telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle.

Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne ofa Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion and racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.

In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate—until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see.

The Actual Star is a feast of ideas about where humanity came from, where we are now, and where we’re going—and how, in every age, the same forces that drive us apart also bind us together.

About Monica Byrne: Monica grew up in Annville, Pennsylvania, as the youngest of five. Her parents were both Catholic theologians, and her family emphasized mysticism, social justice, and the centrality of art to religious experience. Despite growing up on art, she set her heart on becoming an astronaut-so went to Wellesley College and MIT for degrees in biochemistry, worked at NASA during the summers, and got her pilot’s license. But while at MIT, Monica realized she liked making things up much more than finding things out. She finished a Master’s and moved to Durham, North Carolina, and have been writing ever since.

Monica graduated from the Clarion Workshop in 2008, where she studied with Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, and Kelly Link. Her debut novel, The Girl in the Road, was published in 2014. It won the Tiptree Award and was listed for the Kitschie, Locus, and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Her second novel, The Actual Star, was published by Harper Voyager on September 14, 2021. She’s performed original monologues twice at TED, hosted a technology series for ViceUK, and spoken across the country on futurism and science fiction. Her short stories and essays have been published in The Baffler, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Wired, Tor.com, Electric Velocipede, Fantasy Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Electric Literature, and Glimmer Train. She’s written five plays produced in Durham, one of which, What Every Girl Should Know, has been performed from Berkeley to Dublin.

This week’s picks:

* Monica: The Wheel of Time (Prime Video)

* Tracy: The Hogfather – Terry Prachett

* Patrick: Campfire Songs – Hal-Leonard

Links:

* Monica Byrne on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

*

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Derek Kunsken, author of The Quantum War (book 3 of the Quantum Evolution series).

About The Quantum War: The war rages onward and the Union’s premier fighter pilots, the Homo Eridanus, start encountering deadly resistance from strange pilots on the Congregate side. Among wreckage, they find that new Congregate pilots are, in fact, Homo quantus, with strange wiring and AI connections.

At the same time, the Puppets come to the Union with offers of an alliance for a dangerous price: the rescue of the geneticist Antonio Del Casal who is a captive on Venus, with over a hundred Homo quantus.

Only one person might be able to break through the Congregate defenses at Venus, and he’s a con man.

About Derek Kunsken: Derek is a science fiction, fantasy, and sometimes accidentally, horror writer. He writes and reads both novel-length and short fiction, with a preference for works that explore really strange places and people.

This week’s picks:

* Derek #1: DC’s Stargirl (CW/HBOMax)

* Derek #2: Hawkeye (Disney+)

* Tracy: The Good Place: The Podcast

* Patrick: Young Justice: Phantoms (HBOMax)

Links:

* Derek Kunsken on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome CJ Cooke, author of The Lighthouse Witches.

About The Lighthouse Witches: When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.

Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for her missing sisters and mother. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover, she’s initially ecstatic. Clover is the sister she remembers–except she’s still seven years old, the age she was when she vanished. Luna is worried Clover is a wildling. Luna has few memories of her time on the island, but she’ll have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. But she doesn’t realize just how much the truth will change her.

About CJ Cooke: CJ Cooke, also known as Carolyn Jess-Cooke, grew up on a council estate in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the height of the Troubles. She started writing at the age of 7 and pestered publishers for many years with manuscripts typed on her grandparents’ old typewriter and cover notes written on pages ripped from school jotters.

Since then, she has published 12 works in 23 languages and won numerous awards, including an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, a Tyrone Guthrie Prize, a K Blundell Award, and she has won a Northern Writer’s Award three times. In 2011, her debut novel, The Guardian Angel’s Journal, was published by Little, Brown. The novel was an international bestseller. Her second novel, The Boy Who Could See Demons (2012), is a cult classic. Her sixth novel, The Lighthouse Witches, was published in October 2021, and was an Indigo Book of the Month and an international bestseller. CJ’s work is concerned with trauma, motherhood, loss, and social justice.

CJ holds a BA (Hons), MA, and PhD from Queen’s University, Belfast, and commenced her academic career in 2005 as a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sunderland. Shortly thereafter, she published four academic works in swift succession on Shakespearean Cinema and Film Sequels, before establishing her career as a poet, editor, and novelist. Now Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, CJ convenes the prestigious MLitt Creative Writing and researches ways that creative writing can help with trauma and mental health. Throughout 2013-18 she directed the Writing Motherhood project, which explored the impact of motherhood on women’s writing. She is also the founder and director of the Stay-at-Home! Literary Festival, which is dedicated to providing people with accessible, inclusive, and eco-friendly ways to access literature.

CJ has four children and lives with her family in Glasgow, Scotland.

This week’s picks:

* C.J. #1 Pick: The Power of the Dog (Netflix)

* C.J. #2 Pick: Running

* Tracy: Barry’s Gold Label Tea

* Patrick:

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Cat Rambo, author of YOU SEXY THING.

About YOU SEXY THING: TwiceFar station is at the edge of the known universe, and that’s just how Niko Larson, former Admiral in the Grand Military of the Hive Mind, likes it.

Retired and finally free of the continual war of conquest, Niko and the remnants of her former unit are content to spend the rest of their days working at the restaurant they built together, The Last Chance.

But, some wars can’t ever be escaped, and unlike the Hive Mind, some enemies aren’t content to let old soldiers go. Niko and her crew are forced onto a sentient ship convinced that it is being stolen and must survive the machinations of a sadistic pirate king if they even hope to keep the dream of The Last Chance alive.

About Cat Rambo: Cat Rambo lives, writes, and edits in the Pacific Northwest. Their work has appeared in such places as Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons. They were the fiction editor of award-winning Fantasy Magazine and appeared on the World Fantasy Award ballot in 2012 for that work. Their story “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain” was a 2012 Nebula Award finalist.

Rambo has over 250 short stories published and has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Compton Crook, and World Fantasy Award. In 2020, their novelette CARPE GLITTER won the Nebula Award. In 2021, they published fantasy novel EXILES OF TABAT (Wordfire Press) and space opera YOU SEXY THING (Tor Macmillan)

A frequent volunteer with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, they are a former two-term President. They run popular online writing school The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers.

This week’s picks:

* Cat: Esper Genesis (TableTop RPG)

* Tracy: The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin

* Patrick: Queens (ABC/Hulu)

Links:

* Cat Rambo on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome K.E. Flann, author of How to Survive a Human Attack.

About How to Survive a Human Attack: Did you know human attacks account for a staggering 100 percent of premature deaths for witches, swamp monsters, cyborgs, and other supernatural, mutant, and exceptionally large beings?

The past millennia or so has seen not only an uptick in human attacks, but also increasingly indiscriminate victim selection. It is understandable to feel overwhelmed. From renowned preternaturalist K. E. Flann, How to Survive a Human Attack provides critical information at a critical time with chapters specifically tailored to their target audience, including:

* A Zombie’s Guide to Filling the Emptiness and Moving Forward

* First-Time Haunter’s Guide for Ghosts, Spirits, Poltergeists, Specters, and Wraiths

* Self-Training 101 for Werewolves: Sit, Don’t Speak, Stay Alive!

* What’s Happening to My Body?: Radioactive Mutants and the Safety of the Nuclear Family

About K.E. Flann: K.E. Flann’s writing has been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The North American Review, Shenandoah, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and a collection of short stories won the 2014 George Garrett Award at Texas Review Press. Excerpts from this incredibly important work have appeared or will appear in Word Riot, The Higgs Weldon, Defenestration, and Monkeybicycle.

This week’s picks:

* Kathy: How To Mars by David Ebenbach

* Tracy: How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre

* Patrick: Ghosts (BBC version on HBOMax)

Links:

* K.E. Flann on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Zin E. Rocklyn, author of Flowers for the Sea.

About Flowers for the Sea: We are a people who do not forget.

Survivors from a flooded kingdom struggle alone on an ark. Resources are scant, and ravenous beasts circle. Their fangs are sharp.

Among the refugees is Iraxi: ostracized, despised, and a commoner who refused a prince, she’s pregnant with a child that might be more than human. Her fate may be darker and more powerful than she can imagine.

About Zin E. Rocklyn: Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. 7 zine. Their story “Summer Skin” in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax’s Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” to Uncanny Magazine’s Hugo Award-winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Their short story “The Night Sun” and flash fiction “teatime” were published on Tor.com. Flowers for the Sea is their debut novella. Zin is a 2017 VONA and 2018 Viable Paradise graduate as well as a 2022 Clarion West candidate.

This week’s picks:

* Zin: Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (Shudder)

* Tracy: Unspeakable Words (Game)

* Patrick: Only Murders In The Building (Hulu)

Links:

* Zin E. Rocklyn on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Alix Harrow, author of A Spindle Splintered.

About A Spindle Splintered: It’s Zinnia Gray’s twenty-first birthday, which is extra-special because it’s the last birthday she’ll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, just that no-one has lived past twenty-one.

Her best friend Charm is intent on making Zinnia’s last birthday special with a full sleeping beauty experience, complete with a tower and a spinning wheel. But when Zinnia pricks her finger, something strange and unexpected happens, and she finds herself falling through worlds, with another sleeping beauty, just as desperate to escape her fate.

About Alix Harrow: Alix E. Harrow is a Hugo Award-winning American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, and Locus Award, and in 2019 she won a Hugo Award for her story “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies”.

This week’s picks:

* Alix: Matrix: A Novel by Lauren Groff

* Tracy: A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

* Patrick: Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, 6) by Martha Wells

Links:

* Alix E. Harrow on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Becky Chambers, author of A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT and it’s sequel – out next July – A PRAYER FOR THE CROWN-SHY.

About A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT (MONK & ROBOT #1): It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.

One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered.

But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a lot.

About Becky Chambers: Becky Chambers is a science fiction author based in Northern California. She is best known for her Hugo Award-winning Wayfarers series. Her books have also been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, among others. Her latest works are The Galaxy, and The Ground Within (the fourth and final Wayfarers novel), and A Psalm for the Wild-Built (the first of her Monk and Robot novellas).

Becky has a background in performing arts, and grew up in a family heavily involved in space science. She spends her free time playing video games, tabletop RPGs, and looking through her telescope. Having hopped around the world a bit, she’s now back in her home state, where she lives with her wife. She hopes to see Earth from orbit one day.

This week’s picks:

* Becky: Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald (Essay Collection)

* Tracy: Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

* Patrick: Space Catan

Links:

* Join Becky Chambers’ Email Newsletter!

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Helene Wecker, author of The Hidden Palace.

About The Hidden Palace: Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, who can hear the thoughts and longings of those around her and feels compelled by her nature to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a restless creature of fire, once free to roam the desert but now imprisoned in the shape of a man. Fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and try to pass as human—just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Brought together under calamitous circumstances, their lives are now entwined—but they’re not yet certain of what they mean to each other.

Both Chava and Ahmad have changed the lives of the people around them. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets Dima, a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe. Back in New York, in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem they name Yossele—not knowing that she’s about to be sent to an orphanage uptown, where the hulking Yossele will become her only friend and protector.

Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their opposing natures and desires eventually tear them apart—especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other beings like themselves?

About Helene Wecker: Helene Wecker’s first novel, The Golem and the Jinni, was awarded the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, the VCU Cabell Award for First Novel, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and was nominated for a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award. A Midwest native, she holds a B.A. in English from Carleton College and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in literary journals such as Joyland and Catamaran, as well as the fantasy anthology The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and children.

This week’s picks:

* Helene: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

* Tracy: Death (The Art of Living) by Todd May

* Patrick: Big Sky (ABC/HULU)

Links:

* Helene Wecker on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Ryan O’Nan, author of WINDERS – available now for pre-order (Book Drops on October 26th, 2021).

About WINDERS: Juniper Trask is a prodigy, raised under the Council’s strict Code, which allows Winders to exist in secret among average humans. After the shocking murder of her mentor, she is chosen to take his seat on the Council. But as Juniper settles into her new role, cracks of dissension are forming around her, and she uncovers the dark truth behind their power. Juniper has just become a pawn in a game no one knows is being played, and as she begins to question the Code for the first time, her life spirals into a world of danger.

Charlie Ryan always knew he was different, ever since he saved his mother from a horrible car wreck that no one but him remembers. After meeting a mysterious man who claims he has the same ability, Charlie leaves home to chase him for answers. But the world Charlie’s stepped into is more dangerous than he could have imagined. Charlie’s powers are special, and there are those who would kill to get their hands on him.

Now, Juniper and Charlie need each other if they are going to survive the future—no matter which future that may be…

About Ryan O’Nan: Ryan O’Nan is an award-winning screenwriter, actor and director. He has written on such series as Marvel’s Legion on FX, as well as the edgy teenage drama Skins, Queen of the South on USA, and Wu-Tang: An American Saga on Hulu. He wrote/directed the hit indie film “Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best” which was released theatrically by Adam Yauch’s (Beastie Boys) company Oscilloscope Laboratories, where it received several awards. Ryan has been featured in both Filmmaker Magazine and Creative Screenwriting Magazine. As an actor, Ryan is best known for playing King George on the series Queen of the South. Ryan lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and three cats: Bosco Beanbag, Fantine the Bean, and Amelia Wolfman. Winders is Ryan’s debut novel.

This week’s picks:

* Ryan: Magic The Gathering: (WoTC)

* Ryan 2: East of Eden by John Steinbeck

* Tracy: Firefly (Fox)

* Patrick: Star Wars: Visions

Links:

* Ryan O’Nan on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester