The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week, Patrick and Tracy celebrate episode 500 with Catherynne M. Valente, author of The Past Is Red.

About The Past Is Red: The future is blue. Endless blue…except for a few small places that float across the hot, drowned world left behind by long-gone fossil fuel-guzzlers. One of those patches is a magical place called Garbagetown.

Tetley Abednego is the most beloved girl in Garbagetown, but she’s the only one who knows it. She’s the only one who knows a lot of things: that Garbagetown is the most wonderful place in the world, that it’s full of hope, that you can love someone and 66% hate them all at the same time.

But Earth is a terrible mess, hope is a fragile thing, and a lot of people are very angry with her. Then Tetley discovers a new friend, a terrible secret, and more to her world than she ever expected.

About Catherynne M. Valente: Catherynne M. Valente is a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author of forty books of fantasy and science fiction. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, one medium-sized dog, one very enormous cat, a baby son slightly less enormous than the cat (for now), a red accordion, an uncompleted master’s degree, a roomful of yarn, a spinning wheel with ulterior motives, a cupboard of jam and pickles, a bookshelf full of folktales, an industrial torch, an Oxford English Dictionary, and a DSL connection.

This week’s picks:

* Cat #1: For All Mankind

* Cat #2: The Bad Episodes of Star Trek

* Tracy: The Album of Dr. Moreau by Daryl Gregory

* Patrick: Music on Vinyl

Links:

* Catherynne M. Valente on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Lena Nguyen, author of We Have Always Been Here.

About We Have Always Been Here: Misanthropic psychologist Dr. Grace Park is placed on the Deucalion, a survey ship headed to an icy planet in an unexplored galaxy. Her purpose is to observe the thirteen human crew members aboard the ship—all specialists in their own fields—as they assess the colonization potential of the planet, Eos. But frictions develop as Park befriends the androids of the ship, preferring their company over the baffling complexity of humans, while the rest of the crew treats them with suspicion and even outright hostility.

Shortly after landing, the crew finds themselves trapped on the ship by a radiation storm, with no means of communication or escape until it passes—and that’s when things begin to fall apart. Park’s patients are falling prey to waking nightmares of helpless, tongueless insanity. The androids are behaving strangely. There are no windows aboard the ship. Paranoia is closing in, and soon Park is forced to confront the fact that nothing—neither her crew, nor their mission, nor the mysterious Eos itself—is as it seems.

About Lena Nguyen: Lena is a writer of speculative fiction and fantasy. She was raised in Phoenix, Arizona and has studied writing all over the world—including at Stanford, Brown, Harvard, and UCLA. She holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Cornell University, where she also taught as a lecturer of English, leading classes on creative writing, composition, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

Lena’s career has been dedicated to writing. Along with lecturing and teaching, she has worked as a researcher of science fiction; a literary novel judge; a creative consultant; a copy editor; a developmental editor; a game developer and writer; and an assistant editor of the literary publication EPOCH. Her science fiction has won several awards.

Lena is excited to announce the publication of her forthcoming science fiction thriller, WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE: a post-apocalyptic space mystery featuring a misanthropic psychologist and her android companions as they voyage on a haunted spaceship. WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE was published by DAW Books and Penguin Random House on July 6, 2021, and can be ordered online or in stores now.

Lena’s next project is to design, write, and code a full-length, choice-based interactive high fantasy game, as well as to finish her new speculative wasteland adventure: an assassin’s desert romp that lies somewhere between the realms of Mad Max and X-Men.

This week’s picks:

* Lena: Mass Effect Legendary Edition

* Tracy: The Crew – Quest for Planet Nine (Card Game)

* Patrick: Marvel Studios’ Black Widow

Links:

* Lena Nguyen on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functiona...

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome multi-award winning fiction editor Ellen Datlow, whose latest anthology – Body Shocks: Extreme Tales of Body Horror – is coming October 19th from Tachyon Publications.

About Body Shocks: Extreme Tales of Body Horror: The most terrifying thing that you can possibly imagine is your own body in the hands of a monster. Or worse, in the hands of another human being.

In these 29 tales of body horror selected by World Horror Grandmaster Ellen Datlow, you’ll find the unthinkable, the shocking, and more: a couture designer preparing for an exquisitely grotesque runway show; a vengeful son seeking the parent who bred him as plasma donor; a celebrity-kink brothel that inflicts plastic surgery on sex workers; and organ-harvesting doctors who dissect a living man without anesthetic.

About Ellen Datlow: Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over thirty-five years as fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and editor of Event Horizon and SCIFICTION. She currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited more than a hundred science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the annual The Best Horror of the Year, Lovecraft’s Monsters, Fearful Symmetries, The Doll Collection,, The Monstrous, Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, Black Feathers, Haunted Nights (with Lisa Morton), and Mad Hatters and March Hares (stories inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There). Forthcoming are The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea, Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, and The Best of the Best (covering the first Ten volumes of the Best Horror of the Year series).

She’s won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre,” was honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career, and honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www.datlow.com.

This week’s picks:

* Ellen: Little Island Park

Links:

* Ellen Datlow on Twitter* Tracy Townsend on Twitter* Patrick Hester on Twitter* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome back Ryan Van Loan, author of The Justice in Revenge (The Fall of the Gods, 2).

About The Justice in Revenge (The Fall of the Gods, 2): The island nation of Servenza is a land of flint and steel, sail and gearwork, of gods both Dead and sleeping. It is a society where the wealthy few rule the impoverished many.

Determined to change that, former street-rat Buc, along with Eld, the ex-soldier who has been her partner in crime-solving, have claimed seats on the board of the powerful Kanados Trading Company. Buc plans to destroy the nobility from within?which is much harder than she expected.

Stymied by boardroom politics and dodging mages at every turn, Buc and Eld find a potential patron in the Doga, ruler of Servenza. The deal: by the night of the Masquerade, unmask whoever has been attempting to assassinate the Doga, thereby earning her support in the halls of power. Blow the deadline and she’ll have them deported to opposite ends of the world.

Armed with Eld’s razor-sharp sword and Buc’s even sharper intellect, the dynamic duo hit the streets just as the shadow religious conflict between the Gods begins to break into open warfare. Those closest to Buc and Eld begin turning up with their throats slit amid rumors that a hidden mastermind is behind everything that’s going wrong in Servenza.

Facing wrathful gods, hostile nobles, and a secret enemy bent on revenge, Buc and Eld will need every trick in their arsenal to survive. Luckily, extra blades aren’t the only things Buc has hidden up her sleeves.

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:

* Ryan: Bosch The Final Season (Prime)

* Tracy: Ducktales Season 3 (Disney+)

* Patrick: The Is Pop (Netflix)

Links:

* Ryan Van Loan on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patric...

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome share a special Just Us episode from the Patreon feed, wherein they discuss: Monty Python, Spam, Video Games and Windows theme overlays, Keyboards, dog farts, Star Trek, fanzines, manual typewriters, geek culture, buying habits, Patreon and Kickstarter, custom refrigerators with soft serve, root beer (and other) floats, pizza and ice cream, tea, West Virginia, mountain mamas, Malort, Chicago, comfort food, Kentucky, bbq, Harned’s, The Paducah Dog, Long John Silver’s, hush puppies, comfort food, Cracker Barrel, vaccinations, Joliet, The Blues Brothers, The Lord of the Rings, HBOMax, DC’s Harley Queen, Death at a funeral (original), and Alan Tudyk.

Links:

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Christopher Swiedler, author of The Orpheus Plot.

About The Orpheus Plot: Lucas Adebayo grew up on a small mining ship in the asteroid belt, but wants to join the Navy and become the best pilot in the galaxy. The Navy has never accepted a Belter cadet before, but Lucas’s skills secure him a place on the training ship, the Orpheus.

Life in the Navy couldn’t be more different than life in the Belt, and Lucas struggles to find his place. As a Belter, he’s an outsider among his peers; as a Navy cadet, he doesn’t quite fit in at home anymore, either. Lucas is caught between the worlds of his past and his future when a Belter rebellion puts everyone’s lives at risk. Only he can lead the way to peace.

About Christopher Swiedler: Christopher Swiedler is an author and software engineer who lives with his wife and three children in California, where they’re under constant threat from earthquakes, tsunamis, and the occasional Martian dust storm. His goal in life is to win the Newbery Honor (not the medal itself) because he believes being a runner-up builds good character. He is represented by Bridget Smith of JABberwocky Literary Agency. His debut novel, IN THE RED, will be published by HarperCollins in March 2020.

This week’s picks:

* Chris: Kamado Big Green Egg Grill

* Tracy: Spell Smashers (Game)

* Patrick: B.B. King – On The Road (Documentary)

Links:

* Christopher Swiedler on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Andy Weir, author of Project Hail Mary.

About Project hail Mary: Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

About Andy Weir: Andy Weir built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail. He lives in California.

This week’s picks:

* Andy: Woodworking

* Tracy: Spaceteam (app)

* Patrick: Resident Alien (SyFy)

Links:

* Andy Weir 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.M. Szpara, author of FIRST, BECOME ASHES.

About FIRST, BECOME ASHES: For thirty years, the Fellowship of the Anointed isolated its members, conditioning them to believe that pain is power. That magic is suffering. That the world beyond the fence has fallen prey to monsters. But when their leader is arrested, all her teachings come into question.

Those touched by the Fellowship face a choice: how will they adjust to the world they were taught to fear, and how will they relate to the cult’s last crusader, Lark? For Kane, survival means rejecting the magic he and his lover suffered for. For Deryn, the cult’s collapse is an opportunity to prove they are worth as much as their Anointed brother. For Calvin, lark is the alluring embodiment of the magic he’s been seeking his entire life.

But for Lark, the Fellowship isn’t over. Before he can begin to discover himself and heal a lifetime of traumas, he has a monster to slay.

About K.M. Szpara: K.M. Szpara is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD, with a tiny dog. His new book, FIRST, BECOME ASHES, tells a story of self-discovery after trauma and outgrowing abusive origins over the course of an American road trip. Kellan’s debut alt-/near-future novel, DOCILE, explores the snowballing debt crisis, consent, and privilege, and can be described as “really gay”. He is the author of “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time,” a Hugo and Nebula nominated novelette about a gay trans man who’s bitten by a vampire. More of his fiction can be found in venues such as Uncanny, Lightspeed, and Shimmer.

This week’s picks:

* Kellen: Crop Tops

* Tracy: Adventure Time (Hulu)

* Patrick: Naughty Books – Documentary (Hulu)

Links:

* K.M. Szpara on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome David Ebenbach, author of How To Mars.

About How To Mars: For the six lucky scientists selected by the Destination Mars! corporation, a one-way ticket to Mars?in exchange for a lifetime of research?was an absolute no-brainer. The incredible opportunity was clearly worth even the most absurdly tedious screening process. Perhaps worth following the strange protocols in a nonsensical handbook written by an eccentric billionaire. Possibly even worth their constant surveillance, the video of which is carefully edited into a ratings-bonanza back on Earth.

But it turns out that after a while even scientists can get bored of science. Tempers begin to fray; unsanctioned affairs blossom. When perfectly good equipment begins to fail, the Marsonauts are faced with a possibility that their training just cannot explain.

About David Ebenbach: David Ebenbach writes. He’s been writing ever since he was a kid, when he kept his whole family awake by banging away on an enormous manual typewriter, and he’s never wanted to stop.

In fact, David’s now the author of eight books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction (all of which you can find on the Books page), and his work has picked up awards along the way: the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Patricia Bibby Award, and more.

A Philadelphia native, these days David does most of his writing in Washington, DC, where he lives with his family—because he uses a laptop now, he doesn’t keep them awake with his typing—and where he works at Georgetown University, teaching creative writing and literature at the Center for Jewish Civilization and promoting student-centered teaching at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

This week’s picks:

* David: Dunkaroos

* Tracy: Jackbox Games Party Pack 7

* Patrick: Dishonored 2 (PS4)

Links:

* David Ebenbach on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Sarah Pinsker, author of We Are Satellites.

About We Are Satellites: Val and Julie just want what’s best for their kids, David and Sophie. So when teenage son David comes home one day asking for a Pilot, a new brain implant to help with school, they reluctantly agree. This is the future, after all.

Soon, Julie feels mounting pressure at work to get a Pilot to keep pace with her colleagues, leaving Val and Sophie part of the shrinking minority of people without the device.

Before long, the implications are clear, for the family and society: get a Pilot or get left behind. With government subsidies and no downside, why would anyone refuse? And how do you stop a technology once it’s everywhere? Those are the questions Sophie and her anti-Pilot movement rise up to answer, even if it puts them up against the Pilot’s powerful manufacturer and pits Sophie against the people she loves most.

About Sarah Pinsker: Sarah Pinsker is the author of over fifty works of short fiction, including the novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road,” winner of the Nebula Award in 2016. Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Uncanny and in numerous anthologies and year’s bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages, and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, Eugie, and World Fantasy Awards.

Sarah’s first collection, the Philip K Dick Award winning Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories, was published by Small Beer Press in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, was published by Penguin/Random House/Berkley in September 2019. Her latest book is We Are Satellites, out in May 2021.

This week’s picks:

* Sarah: Strawberry Season

* Tracy: The Ethnic Food Aisle

* Patrick: Mare of Easttown (HBO)

Links:

* Sarah Pinsker on Twitter

* Tracy Townsend on Twitter

* Patrick Hester on Twitter

* The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2021 Patrick Hester