What exactly *is* the Prime Directive and what does it reveal about the underpinnings (and overpinnings) of science fiction and fantasy? Most people think of it as a property specifically of the STAR TREK franchise, and they're not *wrong,* exactly, but the base concept shows up again and again, or is responded to time after time, in a number of different seminal texts, from Iain M. Banks' CULTURE to STARGATE SG-1 to ALIEN to David Brin's UPLIFT. We're here to dig into the deets, and talk our way through the various troubles and triumphs of this sociopolitical notion in the genres that we love.

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

What even *are* bugs and what do they do? We set out this pumpkin spice latte season to answer this question and many others, including: What the f@&*k, nature?! Why you gotta be this way?! (and) Where all do bugs crop up in science fiction and fantasy, and how are they used? (and) Do bugs AKA "not-spiders" perform different functions from spiders?

Dig deep (or at least surface-layer deep) into the history of buggy goodness with us as you stock up on candy and prepare for the seige of small children ringing your doorbell!

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

Do you like road trips on water? Do you like a bit of piracy that might involve neither literal water nor literal pirates? Do you ever get a hankering for a classic Enya track in the midst of your science fiction or fantasy reading session?

We're here this week to talk about oceans in science fiction and fantasy. Ocean planets, ocean metaphors, space-as-ocean, Trek ships as submarines, oceans as an early manifestation of an obstacle to overcome or a medium to traverse in journey narratives. Because an ... OCEAN ... of cold air moved into Montana the week of recording, this episode also features the tortured groans of Kend's radiator heater, for which we apologize. (Albeit, sans frostbite.) Fittingly, for this is an episode where we are ALL about the worst puns. Journey with us into Tony's existential crisis as we unpack some of our thoughts and expectations and feelings about oceans as a thing in this genre that we love!

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

There are many thing to fear about this world (and other worlds) right now, but luckily sentient fungus isn't LITERALLY chasing us through the cramped confines of flooded caves in which lives have already been lost many times before. At least, we sure HOPE not.

What IS real and absolutely fantastic is Caitlin Starling's incredible debut work of science fiction horror, "The Luminous Dead." You might already have heard the buzz about this book, and we're here flailing our arms with love to confirm that it really is a smashing good read. A quick warning, though, for our listeners: This episode does contain a couple of spoilers, so we recommend you read the book before listening.

On this week's podcast, we speak with Starling about horror, mapping her story (and the underland), the relationship between fear, agency, and intimacy, and the connections between all of these things and the bodies (including queer bodies) that experience them.

If you're looking to find out more about Starling and "The Luminous Dead," you can check out her website at www.caitlinstarling.com, on Facebook under the handle CaitlinStarlingAuthor, on Twitter as @see_starling, and on Instagram as @authorcstarling.

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

Here's to 100 episodes with our imaginary listeners! In this episode, we celebrate having made it this far by screeching 100 of our favorite things into the abyss.

------------

Parasitic fungus

and anemic vampires

Wild spaceship battles

while a villain conspires

Diverse protagonists

who are very queer

These are a few

of my favorite things

When politics

When climate deniers

When I haunt the Earth

I simply remember

my favorite things

And then I these things

Unearth

------------

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

DON'T: Don't do it, people. Don't be a dick!

Unless your name is Richard or a Philip K. something or other. You probably can't help that one.

DO: Make GBBO references WHENEVER POSSIBLE.

Seriously, though, what's the 4-1-1 on gatekeeping? Is all gatekeeping inherently bad? How can it manifest in different situations? What is the tortured relationship between gatekeeping and the LGBTQIA+ community? AND HAVE YOU LISTENED TO JEANNETTE NG'S Joseph W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer* ACCEPTANCE SPEECH YET?

Between us recording this episode and this episode going live, the World Science Fiction Society did a cool thing and renamed the award the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Because yes, it's absolutely true, Joseph W. Campbell WAS A F%$KING FASCIST.

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

Author Molly Gloss is one of those authors who has helped create the foundations upon which the genres we love, from Western and place-based literature to science fiction, have been built. Her books, including the recent genre-bending short story collection UNFORESEEN, the fantastic longer works OUTSIDE THE GATES and WILD LIFE, science fiction novel DAZZLE OF DAY, as well as the Western novels THE JUMP-OFF CREEK, THE HEARTS OF HORSES, and FALLING FROM HORSES. Whether she's writing in one genre or three or more, Gloss's work interrogates humanity's relationship to wilderness in all its forms. Her work has shown up on lists of authors writing environmental science fiction and fantasy, authors to read after reading the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, and authors whose works have won ... well, gadzooks of awards.

You can find out more about Molly Gloss, her work, and her social media presence by visiting www.mollygloss.com.

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

Last year, paleontologist Steve Brusatte changed all of our lives for the better with the publication of his popular science book, "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World." First of all, we're always here for dinosaurs. But Brusatte brought something really unique to the conversation about dinosaurs: a wide-angle lens of words that captures not just the facts as we know them about the dinosaurs themselves, but a social history of the hunt for dinosaur fossils, the development of new methods of research and study in laboratories around the world, and the diversification of those involved in the research themselves. His book is a portrait of a community working to bring new revelations about this fascinating field of study to light, and we couldn't be more excited to have Brusatte on the 'cast to talk about that community, his book, and dinosaurs on the screen and page.

You can find Brusatte's award-winning book, "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs," wherever good books are found. You can read more of his words on the "Scientific American," NatGeoKids, and "Guardian" websites. And you can find out more about the author as well as his current and future work by following him on Twitter at @SteveBrusatte.

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

If you haven't yet read Kali Wallace's new book of science fiction and spacebound horror, "Salvation Day," you're missing out on one of our favorite things to break into (or out of) the genre this year. Full of creeptastic imagery and characters that make plausible decisions in tragic circumstances, "Salvation Day" unspools questions of humanity, responsibility, memory, legacy, and the potential for fundamental decency and self-sacrifice in a post-most-apocalypse society. Kali Wallace was kind enough to sit down with us to talk about reverse-engineering personal histories and responding to the world as-is, and envisioning this cool new space where the decisions that characters make under pressure require every bit as much thought as calculating the delta-v of their spacecraft engines.

You can find out more about Kali Wallace online at www.kaliwallace.com as well as on Instagram @kaliphyte!

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.

What do R2-D2, Pantalaimon, a weird robot koala thing, and Captain Marvel's Flerken friend Goose all have in common? They may (or may not) be new iterations of the age-old concept of a familiar.

With a burgeoning awareness of the hazards and intersections of this topic with matters of cultural appropriation, we set out to answer a couple of fundamental questions:

A) What exactly *is* a familiar, daemon, or animal companion if not a plot-useful pet?

B) What can a familiar/daemon/animal companion DO for authors and readers of science fiction and fantasy that they can't necessarily do in other genres?

3) What do some of the more iconic as well as some of the more murky and borderline examples offer us in better understanding this genre/mode/cat we love so much?

Watch our feed in the weeks to come as we start another round of exciting guest episodes——featuring authors and scientists and thinkers you'll be sure to fall in love with if you haven't already!

Like our content? Our website is www.imaginaries.net, and you can drop us a line at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @imaginary_pod. You can listen to our episodes on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and SoundCloud, as well as find all of our back episodes on YouTube once they have shuffled off these other earthly coils. If you would like to help support our work, you can give us a rating or review on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts, and if you would like to offset the costs associated with our podcast, you can support us financially at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries.