The Functional Nerds Podcast

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Two-Time Hugo Award winner Paul Weimer.

About Paul Weimer: Paul Weimer is a Two-Time 2024 Hugo Award winner for Fan Writer and Fanzine (Editor). Not really a Prince of Amber, but rather, an ex-pat New Yorker living in Minnesota, Paul Weimer has been reading sci-fi and fantasy for over 40 years. An avid and enthusiastic amateur photographer, blogger and podcaster, Paul primarily contributes to the Skiffy and Fanty Show as blogger and podcaster, to Nerds of a Feather as a reviewer and interviewer, to the SFF Audio podcast, and turns up elsewhere as well. If you’ve spent any time reading about SFF online, you’ve probably read one of his reviews, comments or tweets (he’s @PrinceJvstin).

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 640-With Paul Weimer appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome John Jackson Miller, author of BATMAN: RESURRECTION.

About BATMAN: RESURRECTION: The Joker is dead, but not forgotten. Gotham City is saved, but it is still not safe. By night, its new symbol of hope, Batman, continues his fight to protect the innocent and the powerless. By day, his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, wonders whether there may someday be a future beyond skulking the city’s rooftops or the cavernous halls of his stately manor alongside the ever-dutiful Alfred Pennyworth.

But even after death, the Clown Prince of Crime’s imprint can be seen in more than just the pavement. Remnants from The Joker’s gang are leading wannabes fascinated by his bizarre mystique on a campaign of arson that threatens the city—even as it serves greedy opportunists, including millionaire Max Shreck. And survivors of exposure to The Joker’s chemical weapon Smylex continue to crowd Gotham City’s main hospital.

To quell the chaos, Batman needs more than his cape and his well-stocked Utility Belt. Bruce Wayne is forced into action, prompting a partnership with a charismatic scientist to help solve the health crisis. But as he works in both the shadows and the light, Bruce finds himself drawn deeper into Gotham City’s turmoil than ever before, fueling his obsession to save the city—an obsession that has already driven a wedge between him and Vicki Vale. The loyal Alfred, who had hoped Bruce’s efforts as Batman could help him find closure, finds the opposite happening. Nightmares begin to prompt Bruce to ask new questions about the climactic events in the cathedral, and investigations by Commissioner Gordon and reporter Alexander Knox into the arsons only amplify his concerns.

Having told the people of Gotham City that they’d earned a rest from crime, Batman finds the forces of evil growing ever more organized—and orchestrated—by a sinister hand behind the scenes. The World’s Greatest Detective must solve the greatest mystery of all: Could The Joker have somehow survived? And could he still have the last laugh against the people of Gotham City?

About John Jackson Miller: New York Times bestselling author John Jackson Miller has spent a lifetime immersed in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction. He’s best known for his Star Wars and Star Trek work, including Star Wars: Kenobi, his Scribe Award winning novel from Del Rey; Star Wars: A New Dawn; the Star Trek: Prey trilogy, and Star Trek: Discovery – The Enterprise War.

He’s also written comics included the long-running Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic comics series, as well as comics for Battlestar Galactica, Halo, Lion King, Mass Effect, Iron Man, Indiana Jones, and The Simpsons. Production notes on all his works can be found at his fiction site (farawaypress.com).

Miller is also a noted comics industry historian, specializing in studying comic-book circulation as presented on his website, Comichron (comichron.com). He also coauthored the Standard Catalog of Comic Books series.

This week’s picks:

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© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 639-With John Jackson Miller appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Luis Jaramillo, author of The Witches of El Paso.

About The Witches of El Paso: 1943, El Paso, Texas: teenager Nena spends her days caring for the small children of her older sisters, while longing for a life of freedom and adventure. The premonitions and fainting spells she has endured since childhood are getting worse, and Nena worries she’ll end up like the scary old curandera down the street. Nena prays for help, and when the mysterious Sister Benedicta arrives late one night, Nena follows her across the borders of space and time. In colonial Mexico, Nena grows into her power, finding love and learning that magic always comes with a price.

In the present day, Nena’s grandniece, Marta, balances a struggling legal aid practice with motherhood and the care of the now ninety-three-year-old Nena. When Marta agrees to help search for a daughter Nena left in the past, the two forge a fierce connection. Marta’s own supernatural powers emerge, awakening her to new possibilities that threaten the life she has constructed.

About Luis Jaramillo: Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Doctor’s Wife, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest, an Oprah Book of the Week, and one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012. His novel The Witches of El Paso (Atria/Simon & Schuster) will be published in the fall of 2024. Luis’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, Lit Hub, Poets & Writers Magazine, BOMB Magazine and the Chattahoochee Review, among other publications. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at The New School. He received an undergraduate degree from Stanford and an MFA from The New School.

This week’s picks:

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© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 638-With Luis Jaramillo appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Martha Wells, author of the updated and revised version of Wheel of the Infinite.

About the updated and revised version of Wheel of the Infinite: A traitor and a swordsman join forces to save the world from being rewritten into devastation.

Every year the image of the Wheel of the Infinite must be painstakingly remade to ensure another year of peace and harmony for the Celestial Empire. Every hundred years the very fabric of the world must be rewoven. Linked by the mystic energies of the Infinite, the Wheel and world are one. But a black storm is spreading across the Wheel, reappearing each morning, bigger and darker than before, unraveling the beautiful and orderly patterns.

Maskelle, a murderer and traitor, has been summoned back to help put the world right with the assistance of the mysterious Rian, a swordsman of some renown. If they can’t find the source of the problems that plague the Wheel, the world may find its latest rotation is its last.

About Martha Wells: Martha Wells has been an SF/F writer since her first fantasy novel was published in 1993, and her work includes The Books of the Raksura series, the Ile-Rien series, The Murderbot Diaries series, and other fantasy novels, most recently Witch King (Tordotcom, 2023). She has also written media tie-in fiction for Star Wars, Stargate: Atlantis, and Magic: the Gathering, as well as short fiction, YA novels, and non-fiction. She has won Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, Locus Awards, and a Dragon Award, and her work has appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the BSFA Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, the Sunday Times Bestseller List, and the New York Times Bestseller List. She is a member of the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and her books have been published in thirty languages.

She is also a consulting producer on the Murderbot series for Apple TV+.

This week’s picks:

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© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 637-With Martha Wells appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Peter F. Hamilton, author of Exodus: The Archimedes Engine.

About Exodus: The Archimedes Engine: In a past age, humanity fled a dying Earth in massive ark ships. These searched the galaxy to find a new home. Then one fleet found Centauri, a dense cluster of stars teeming with habitable planets. Now, thousands of years later, Centauri’s settlers have evolved into advanced beings known as Celestials – and their great houses rule vast star systems.

As they vie for supremacy, Earth’s ark ships continue to arrive, and humans must serve these repressive masters. But is there a better life beyond the empire? Finn is a Centauri-born human and yearns for a brighter future. So, when another ark ship arrives, previously thought lost, Finn seizes the chance to become a Traveler. These heroes explore the vast unknowns of distant space, dedicated to humanity’s survival. And they hope – one day – to find freedom.

About Peter F. Hamilton: Peter F. Hamilton was born in Rutland in 1960. He began writing in 1987, and sold his first short story to FEAR Magazine in 1988. He has written many bestselling novels, including the Greg Mandel series, the Night’s Dawn trilogy, the Commonwealth Saga, the Void trilogy, the Chronicle of the Fallers and the Salvation Sequence, as well as short-story collections and several standalone titles, including Fallen Dragon and Great North Road.

This week’s picks:

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© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 636-With Peter F. Hamilton appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Stephanie Wrobel, author of THE HITCHCOCK HOTEL.

About THE HITCHCOCK HOTEL: Alfred Smettle is not your average Hitchcock fan. He is the founder, owner, and manager of The Hitchcock Hotel, a sprawling Victorian house in the White Mountains dedicated to the Master of Suspense. There, Alfred offers his guests round-the-clock film screenings, movie props and memorabilia in every room, plus an aviary with fifty crows.

To celebrate the hotel’s first anniversary, he invites his former best friends from his college Film Club for a reunion. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in sixteen years, not after what happened.

But who better than them to appreciate Alfred’s creation? And to help him finish it.

After all, no Hitchcock set is complete without a body.

About Stephanie Wrobel: Stephanie Wrobel is an international and USA Today bestselling author. Her debut, Darling Rose Gold, has sold rights in twenty-one countries and was a finalist for the Edgar® Award for Best First Novel. Wrobel grew up in Chicago and now lives in New York City. THE HITCHCOCK HOTEL will be released on September 24, 2024.

This week’s picks:

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© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 635-With Stephanie Wrobel appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Ken Liu, translator of Laozi’s Dao De Jing.

About Laozi’s Dao De Jing: Laozi’s Dao De Jing was written around 400 BC by a compassionate soul in a world torn by hatred and ambition, dominated by those that yearned for apocalyptic confrontations and prized ideology over experience. By speaking out against the cleverness of elites and the arrogance of the learned, Laozi upheld the wisdom of the concrete, the humble, the quotidian, the everyday individual dismissed by the great powers of the world. Earthy, playful, and defiant, Laozi’s words gave solace to souls back then, and offer comfort today. Now, this beautifully designed new edition serves as both an accessible new translation of an ancient Chinese classic and a fascinating account of renowned novelist Ken Liu’s transformative experience while wrestling with the classic text.

Throughout this translation, Liu takes us through his own struggles to capture the meaning in Laozi’s text in a series of thoughtful and provocative interstitial entries. Unlike traditional notes that purport to be objective, these entries are explicitly personal and unapologetically subjective. Gradually, as Liu learns that true wisdom cannot be pinned down in words, the notes grow sparser until they fade away entirely. His journey suggests the only way out of struggle is to engage with texts that have survived the millennia, wrestling with ideas that gesture at something eternal, in hopes that we might eventually reach that moment of transcendent joy.

Liu’s translation, by eschewing cleverness, paradoxically reveals the slipperiness of Laozi’s original. The Dao De Jing has been translated countless times and will be translated countless times in the future. In that constant change and flow, we finally find our home in Dao, the eternal principle that allows us, finite beings in time and space, to reckon and reconcile with the infinite.

About Ken Liu: Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards for his fiction, he has also won top genre honors abroad in Japan, Spain, and France.

Liu’s most characteristic work is the four-volume epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty, in which engineers, not wizards, are the heroes of a silkpunk world on the verge of modernity. His debut collection of short fiction, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. A second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, followed. He also penned the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.

He’s often involved in media adaptations of his work. Recent projects include “The Message,” under development by 21 Laps and FilmNation Entertainment; “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in season one of Netflix’s breakout adult animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, with Craig Silverstein as executive producer, adapted from an interconnected series of Liu’s short stories.

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, history of technology, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

In addition to his original fiction, Liu also occasionally publishes literary translations. His most recent work of translation is a new rendition of Laozi’s Dao De Jing.

Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 634-With Ken Liu appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Unexploded Remnants, author of Elaine Gallagher.

About Unexploded Remnants: Alice is the last human. Street-smart and bad-ass.

After discovering what appears to be an A.I. personality in an antique data core, Alice decides to locate its home somewhere in the stargate network. At the very least, she wants to lay him to rest because, as it turns out, she’s stumbled upon the sentient control unit of a deadly ancient weapon system.

Convincing the ghost of a raging warrior that the war is over is about as hard as it sounds, which is to say, it’s near-impossible. But, if Alice fails and the control unit falls into the wrong hands, the balance of power her side of the Milky Way could fall apart. As Alice ports throughout the known universe seeking answers and aid she will be faced with impossible choice after impossible choice and the growing might of an unstoppable foe.

About Elaine Gallagher: Elaine Gallagher is a transgender woman, and much of her writing is concerned with the outsider experience and finding family. She is a long-time member of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers’ Circle, and studied creative writing at Glasgow University. Her recent publications include a poetry chapbook, Transient Light, and a story in the GSFWC charity anthology Flotation Device. She has also published book reviews and editorial in Interzone magazine and written and produced an award-winning short film, High Heels Aren’t Compulsory.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 633-With Elaine Gallagher appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Hana Lee, author of ROAD TO RUIN.

About ROAD TO RUIN: Jin-Lu has the most dangerous job in the wasteland. She’s a magebike courier, one of the few who venture outside the domed cities on motorcycles powered by magic. Every day, she braves the wasteland’s dangers—deadly storms, roving marauders, and territorial beasts—to deliver her wares.

Her most valuable cargo? A prince’s love letters addressed to Yi-Nereen, a princess desperate to escape the clutches of her abusive family and soon-to-be husband. Jin, desperately in love with both her and the prince, can’t refuse Yi-Nereen’s plea for help. The two of them flee across the wastes, pursued by Yi-Nereen’s furious father, her scheming betrothed, and a bounty hunter with mysterious powers.

A storm to end all storms is brewing and dark secrets about the heritability of magic are coming to light. Jin’s heart has led her into peril before, but this time she may not find her way back.

About Hana Lee: Hana Lee is a biracial Korean American writer who also builds software for a living. In her downtime, she enjoys knitting, crochet, and video games. She lives in California with her partner and two fluffy cats. Her debut novel, ROAD TO RUIN, was published by Saga Press in 2024.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 632-With Hana Lee appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Mary Robinette Kowal, author of Silent Spaces.

About Silent Spaces: Silent Spaces: Tales from the Lady Astronauts is a collection of 9 short stories in the Lady Astronaut Series written by Mary Robinette Kowal, including one written just for this collection.

With this campaign the book will be available in print for the first time in English as a Softcover, and a Limited Edition Signed and Numbered Hardcover!

About Mary Robinette Kowal: Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of the Lady Astronaut duology and historical fantasy novels: The Glamourist Histories series and Ghost Talkers.

She’s a member of the awardwinning podcast Writing Excuses and has received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, four Hugo awards, the RT Reviews award for Best Fantasy Novel, the Nebula, and Locus awards. Stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, several Year’s Best anthologies and her collections Word Puppets and Scenting the Dark and Other Stories.

Her novel Calculating Stars is one of only eighteen novels to win the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards in a single year. As a professional puppeteer and voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), Mary Robinette has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures, and founded Other Hand Productions. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve. She records fiction for authors such as Seanan McGuire, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi.

This week’s picks:

Links:

© 2024 Patrick Hester

The post Episode 631-With Mary Robinette Kowal appeared first on The Functional Nerds.