The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Morgan Ryan, author of A RESISTANCE OF WITCHES.

About A RESISTANCE OF WITCHES: Stubborn, plain-spoken and from an unimpressive family, Lydia Polk never expected to be accepted into the Royal Academy of Witches. Now, with Hitler’s army rampaging across Europe, the witches of Britain have joined the war effort, and Lydia is key to the cause: she must use her magic to track down magical relics before Hitler and his sycophants can. When a Nazi witch infiltrates the Academy with heart-breaking consequences, the coven is left shaken, exposed and divided. The elder British witches have no interest in further loss of coven life in service of a government that has forced them into hiding for decades, no matter the consequences to the world. But with the discovery of the Grimorium Bellum, an ancient book that leaves a trail of death and destruction wherever it goes, Lydia knows her mission has never been more urgent.

Alone and woefully outnumbered, Lydia makes her way to the heart of occupied France, where she finds allies in Rebecca Gagne—a fierce French resistance fighter chockful of secrets—and Henry Boudreaux—a handsome Haitian-American art historian with a little magic of his own. Together, they traverse the country, stalked by the natural and supernatural alike, in search of the grimoire. But, as Lydia soon discovers, finding the book is only half the battle—the Grimorium Bellum has a dark agenda all its own. Lydia must subdue it before the Witches of the Third Reich can use it—but she’ll have to survive the book herself, first.

About Morgan Ryan: Morgan Ryan is the author of stories born from a lifelong love of magic, a fixation on historical minutiae that borders on the obsessive, and a tendency to fall down rabbit-holes. She was raised in a family of writers in upstate New York, and received her degree in theatre performance from Northeastern University. She now lives in Chicago with her husband. A Resistance of Witches is her first novel.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 670-With Morgan Ryan appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Michael Damian Thomas, to talk about Uncanny Magazine Year 12: Fly Forever, Space Unicorns!.

About Uncanny Magazine Year 12: Fly Forever, Space Unicorns!: Editor-in-Chief/Publisher Michael Damian Thomas and Team Uncanny Magazine have run successful Kickstarters for the seven-time Hugo Award-winning, 2024 World Fantasy Award-winning, and 2024 Locus Award-winning Uncanny Magazine Years One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, and Eleven. We promised to bring you stunning cover art, passionate science fiction and fantasy fiction and poetry, gorgeous prose, and provocative essays 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 for or winners of Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, Ignyte, and World Fantasy Awards!

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 12 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. Unfortunately, there is a less-than-celebratory side to this Kickstarter. Recently, a very large online eBook dealer ended its magazine subscriptions and moved Uncanny onto their streaming service. This meant over a 75% reduction of our subscription earnings.

YOUR support, specifically, makes it possible for us to make our magazine freely available on our website and to pay our contributors and staff. We need your help more than ever, Space Unicorns!

About Michael Damian Thomas: Michael Damian Thomas is the eight-time Hugo, British Fantasy, World Fantasy, and Parsec Award-winning co-publisher (with Lynne M. Thomas) and editor-in-chief of the Locus Award-winning Uncanny Magazine. Michael was a Hugo Award finalist as the former Managing Editor of Apex Magazine (2012-2013), co-edited the Hugo Award finalist essay anthology Queers Dig Time Lords (Mad Norwegian Press, 2013) with Sigrid Ellis, and co-edited the anthology Glitter & Mayhem (Apex Publications, 2013) with John Klima and Lynne M. Thomas. Michael was additionally a contributor to the SF Squeecast podcast (with Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Lynne M. Thomas, and Catherynne M. Valente), a contributor to the Down and Safe- Blake’s 7 podcast (with Amal El-Mohtar, Scott Lynch, and L.M. Myles), and is currently the Content Editor (with Lynne M. Thomas) of the It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton podcast.

Michael was formerly the full-time caregiver of his late daughter, Caitlin. Caitlin had a rare congenital disorder called Aicardi syndrome.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 669-With Uncanny Magazine’s Michael Damian Thomas appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Matthew Kressel, author of SPACE TRUCKER JESS.

About SPACE TRUCKER JESS: Jessian Urania Darger is a kick-ass take-no-shit foul-mouthed too-smart-for-her-own-good sixteen-year-old girl with a chip on her shoulder. She and her daddy have been grifting their way across the verse for years. But when her daddy gets arrested for running crypto-credit scams, Jess is forced to get a job on Chadeisson Station as a roachrunner, fixing starships to survive.

She dreams of a better life, away from her corrupt daddy, so she’s been saving up to buy a Spark Megahauler, a huge cargo ship, ever since she saw one in a printer catalog. She wants to run the long hauls, to sail alone into the black and never look back.

But when her daddy goes missing from prison, Jess realizes she just can’t let him go, and she makes it her life’s mission to find out where he’s gone. In an odyssey that takes her across the galaxy, Jess encounters vanished planets, strange societies, inscrutable alien gods, and mind-bending secrets that may change humanity’s path forever.

About Matthew Kressel: Matt is a software developer and speculative fiction writer with three Nebula Award nominations, a World Fantasy Award nomination, and a Eugie Award nomination. He’s the co-host of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in New York City. And he created the Moksha submissions system, in use by some of the largest publishers in speculative fiction today.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

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This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Antony Johnston, author of Can You Solve the Murder?

About Can You Solve the Murder?: One murder. Six suspects. One truth for YOU to uncover.

YOU are the lead detective and it’s your job to investigate the most mysterious crime of your career.

There’s been a murder at Elysium, a wellness retreat set in an English country manor. You arrive to find the body of a local businessman on the lawn – with a rose placed in his mouth. It appears he was stabbed with a gardening fork and fell to his death from the balcony above. You quickly realize that balcony can only be accessed through a locked door, the key is missing, and everyone in Elysium is now a suspect… Who did it and why? It’s up to you to figure it out.

YOU gather the evidence and examine the clues.

YOU choose who to interview next, and who to accuse as your prime suspect.

But remember that every decision YOU make has consequences – and some of them will prove fatal…

Do you have what it takes? Can YOU solve the murder? Put your sleuthing skills to the test!

About Antony Johnston: Antony Johnston is one of the most versatile writers of the modern era.

The Charlize Theron movie Atomic Blonde was based on his graphic novel. His murder mystery The Dog Sitter Detective won the Barker Book Award for fiction. His crime puzzle novel Can You Solve the Murder? reinvented the choose-your-own-story format for a modern audience. The Brigitte Sharp spy thrillers are in development for TV. And his productivity guide The Organised Writer has helped authors all over the world take control of their workload.

Antony is a celebrated videogames writer, with genre-defining titles including Dead Space, Shadow of Mordor, and Resident Evil Village to his credit. He also consulted on the Emmy Award-winning Silent Hill Ascension, making him the only writer in the world to have worked on all of the ‘big three’ horror gaming franchises.

His immense body of work also includes Marvel superheroes such as Daredevil, Wolverine, and Shang-Chi; the Alex Rider graphic novels; the post-apocalypse epic Wasteland; and more. He wrote and directed the sci-fi film Crossover Point, made entirely in quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic.

An experienced podcaster and public speaker, he also frequently writes articles on the life of an author, and is a prolific musician.

Antony is a former vice chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, a member of International Thriller Writers and the Society of Authors, a Shore Scripts screenwriting judge, and sits on the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s videogames committee. He lives and works in England.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 667-With Antony Johnston appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Auston Habershaw, author of If Wishes Were Retail.

About If Wishes Were Retail: Alex Delmore needs a miracle. She wants out of her dead-end suburban town, but her parents are broke and NYU seems like a distant dream.

Good thing there’s a genie in town?and he’s hiring at the Wellspring Mall.

It’d help if the Jinn-formerly-of-the-Ring-of-Khorad knew even one thing about 21st-century America. It’d help if he weren’t at least as stubborn as Alex. It’d really help if her brother didn’t sell her out to her conspiracy theory-loving, gnome-hating dad.

When Alex and the genie set up their wishing kiosk, they face seemingly-endless setbacks. The mall is failing and management will not stop interfering on behalf of their big-box tenants, especially the megastore ValuDay.

But when the wishing biz might start working, the biggest problem of all remains: People are really terrible at wishing.

About Auston Habershaw: On the day Auston Habershaw was born, Skylab fell from the heavens. This foretold two possible fates: supervillain or scifi/fantasy author. Fortunately he chose the latter, and spends his time imagining the could-be and the never-was rather than disintegrating the moon with his volcano laser. He lives and works in Boston, MA.

Auston is a winner of the Writers of the Future Contest (2nd place in quarter 1, 2014) and has published stories in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Escape Pod, among other places. His fantasy series, The Saga of the Redeemed is available through Harper Voyager Impulse.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 666-With Auston Habershaw appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome back Randee Dawn, author of The Only Song Worth Singing.

About The Only Song Worth Singing: Childhood friends Patrick, Ciaran, and Malachi would’ve been happy to play music for coins on the streets of Dublin, but when their sound – a blend of traditional tunes and rock styling – lands them a record deal, they also get their first tour of America. As they gather fans, however, they also get the attention of three sídhe, fairies straight out of Irish tradition who play by their own rules.

Mal finds himself beleaguered by a prankster whose malicious tricks make him think he’s losing his mind, while Ciaran falls hard for a hanger-on whose primal sexuality saps the life from him. Patrick can save them – if he’s willing to trust the superstitions he learned during a painful childhood he thought he’d left behind long ago.

But the only thing that matters more than music to Patrick? His friends.

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, published in August 2022 (Solaris/Rebellion).

Randee’s short fiction has appeared in publications and podcasts including 3AM Magazine (“The View of My Brother’s Profile in the Rear-View Mirror,” 2001; “Warm, In Your Coat,” 2004) and Well-Told Tales (“Home for the Holidays,” 2015; “Can’t Keep a Dead Man Down,” 2017).

Dawn’s stories have appeared in anthologies including Where We May Wag (“The Last Dog,” Writing Piazza Press, 2018), Children of a Different Sky (“Can’t Find My Way Home,” Kos Books, 2018), Magic for Beginners (“Queen Zoe and the Spinning Game,” Fantasia Divinity, 2019), Dim Shores Presents (“Rough Beast, Slouching,” 2021), Another World: Stories of Portal Fantasy (“The Way Is Clear,” SummerStorm Press, 2021), and Horror for the Throne: One-Sitting Reads (“Cat Person”).

She has a short collection of dark speculative fiction short stories, “Home for the Holidays” (2014) and co-authored “The Law & Order: SVU Unofficial Companion” (BenBella Books, 2009). She co-edited the speculative fiction anthology of “what if” stories about The Beatles, “Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles” (Fantastic Books, 2019).

When not making stuff up, Randee publishes entertainment profiles, reviews, and think pieces regularly in outlets including Variety, The Los Angeles Times, Today.com and Emmy Magazine, and writes trivia for BigBrain.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 665-With Randee Dawn appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Mark Stevens, author of No Lie Lasts Forever.

About No Lie Lasts Forever: When a reporter dies in a shockingly familiar way, the media rushes to announce the return of the PDQ Killer. The city of Denver reels, but no one more than Harry Kugel. After all, he is the PDQ Killer – or was fifteen years ago. And he didn’t do this.

Still working to reform his ways, Harry won’t let some amateur murderer ride his twisted coattails and risk drawing the police back his way. To protect his legacy and quiet new life, he’ll have to expose the copycat. Without exposing himself.

Disgraced TV journalist Flynn Martin holds the key. After a botched hostage situation, she’ll do anything to revive her dying career – even hunt down a monster who executed one of her own.

Harry must convince Flynn to follow him into the heady world of a killer. But with the law closing in and a rival at large, he starts to feel the familiar pull of old urges…

About Mark Stevens: Mark Stevens is the author of No Lie Lasts Forever (June 2025 from Thomas & Mercer), The Fireballer (Lake Union, 2023), and The Allison Coil Mystery Series including Antler Dust, Buried by the Roan, Trapline, Lake of Fire, and The Melancholy Howl.

Buried by the Roan, Trapline, and Lake of Fire were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award. Trapline won.

Stevens has had short stories published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, and in Denver Noir (Akashic Books, 2022). Denver Noir went on to win the Colorado Book Award for Best Anthology in 2023.

In 2016 and again in 2023, Stevens was named Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year.

Stevens hosted a regular podcast for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers for ten years.

Stevens has served as president of the Rocky Mountain chapter for Mystery Writers of America. Stevens also regularly publishes reviews on his review website.

Today, Stevens lives in Mancos, Colorado.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 664-With Mark Stevens appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Victoria Helen Stone, author of Bald-Faced Liar.

About Bald-Faced Liar: Traveling nurse Elizabeth May has a promising new home in Santa Cruz. And another new identity. It’s a pattern of reinvention for a woman escaping her traumatic childhood?and hiding from the decades of notoriety and destruction that followed. Invisibility has kept Elizabeth safe. Until now. After all these years, someone sees her for who she is.

Threat by threat, a vengeful stalker is dismantling Elizabeth’s carefully constructed lifetime of lies. And no one in her temporary circle can be trusted?not her fleeting new love interest, not the supportive friend she knows only from online forums, and certainly not the police. They’ve never been there for her.

As fear sharpens to terror, Elizabeth soon discovers something about her past that even she didn’t know. The revelation could finally set her on a path of healing and redemption. Or, now alone in the dark, it could be Elizabeth’s worst nightmare.

About Victoria Helen Stone: Victoria Helen Stone, author of the runaway best seller Jane Doe, writes critically acclaimed novels of dark intrigue and emotional suspense. Aside from Follow Her Down, At The Quiet Edge, The Last One Home, Problem Child, Half Past, and the chart-topping False Step and Evelyn, After, she also published twenty-nine books as USA Today bestselling author Victoria Dahl and won the prestigious American Library Association Reading List award for best genre fiction. Her novels have been published in English, Russian, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Lithuanian, Portuguese, German, French, Japanese, Indonesian, Czech, Hebrew, Estonian, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Thai.

Victoria writes in her home office high in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, far from her origins in the flattest plains of Minnesota, Texas, and Oklahoma. She enjoys gorgeous summer trail hikes in the mountains almost as much as she enjoys staying inside by the fire during winter. Victoria is passionate about dessert, true crime, and her terror of mosquitoes, which have targeted her in a diabolical conspiracy to hunt her down no matter the season.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 663-With Victoria Helen Stone appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome S.A. Barnes, author of Cold Eternity.

About Cold Eternity: Halley is on the run from an interplanetary political scandal that has put a huge target on her back. She heads for what seems like the perfect place to lay low: a gigantic space barge storing the cryogenically frozen bodies of Earth’s most fortunate citizens from more than a century ago…

The cryo program, created by trillionaire tech genius Zale Winfeld, is long defunct, and the AI hologram “hosts,” ghoulishly created in the likeness of Winfeld’s three adult children, are glitchy. The ship feels like a crypt, and the isolation gets to Halley almost immediately. She starts to see figures crawling in the hallways, and there’s a constant scraping, slithering, and rattling echoing in the vents.

It’s not long before Halley realizes she may have gotten herself trapped in an even more dangerous situation than the one she was running from..

About S.A. Barnes: S.A. BARNES works in a high school library by day, recommending reads, talking with students, and removing the occasional forgotten cheese stick as bookmark. Barnes has published numerous novels across different genres under the pen name Stacey Kade. She lives in Illinois with more dogs and books than is advisable and a very patient husband.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 662-With S.A. Barnes appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Maura Jortner, author of Keepers of the Marsh.

About Keepers of the Marsh: Twelve-year-old Lana isn’t looking for trouble when she ventures into the swampy marsh behind her family’s home in Galveston Bay. She’s just sweaty and bored and lonely, sick of sitting around doing nothing.

Her family never goes anywhere. Her mom and her sisters want nothing to do with her, and none of them will talk about their dead dad. With loads of unanswered questions and no other options, Lana decides to seek out the legendary Alligator Witch—if she’s even real.

What Lana doesn’t realize is that the Alligator Witch is very real, and has spent decades plotting her revenge on the town. When the witch swiftly casts a terrifying curse, the only person Lana can ask for help is her unfriendly and generally unwilling twin, Gracie.

Together, the twins embark on a memorable journey to make sense of the Alligator Witch’s dark past, along with the unexpected role their family played in her descent. In spite of their differences, Lana and Gracie must unite to make things right and save their loved ones.

About Maura Jortner: Maura was born in New Hampshire, and loved it there. She still misses living in New England. But she moved to Ohio to go to college and after that, lived in Cincinnati for a few years. Maura worked as a stage manager and a puppeteer. She would have continued on as a puppeteer forever–the job was great and the puppets were amazing–but she couldn’t pay back my student loans, so Maura returned to school and earned an MA in literature at Xavier University, and through that experience, remembered how much she loved school. Maura wanted to keep learning, applied to lots of PhD programs and chose the University of Pittsburgh. Maura studied theater history, focusing on American drama in the 19th century. In 2008, Baylor University hired her to teach in the English department, and Maura moved to Texas. Now, she nerds out with students about American literature, British literature, and creative writing. It’s a great job. In her spare time, she writes novels.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2025 Patrick Hester

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