Some people are born into families, some people make their own, and some people stumble onto theirs in the dark. This week, we're here for the found families which gave us a home in science fiction and fantasy. You'll know many of the titles and many of the worlds: Star Trek, Harry Potter, Firefly, Lumberjanes, Avatar the Last Airbender & The Legend of Korra, Steven Universe, Jacqueline Carey's "Starless," Becky Chambers' everything, Charlie Jane Anders' "All the Birds in the Sky," Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," and many many (MANY) more.

There's something inherently queer about the found family trope, or perhaps more rightly we should say that found families make critical space for the queer conversations which have informed our lives as readers and authors and commentators on science fiction and family. We find ourselves in these books, and we want to dig into all of the reasons why!

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

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What exactly *is* the legacy of J.K. Rowling's boy wizard, and in what ways has the "Harry Potter" series transformed or transmuted the science fictional and fantastical landscape? In what ways have we, Rowling's readers, gone off-script and gone about making space for ourselves as newly minted adults and tastemakers and, yes, occasionally, as academics? And what about those prequels, that weird stage play, and all the other canon Potterverse ... things ... which have cropped up since the original series was published?

As you can imagine, we have a lot of questions about what the Boy Who Lived has gotten up to in the years since that last weird epilogue, and we have some thoughts on what he's done to a brance of genres and our brains and the publishing industry. 80s kids, this is not one to miss!

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

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A noisy but important episode, we bring you an interview with fantasy author Jess E. Owen, whose now-completed Summer King Chronicles series leaned into the legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin, Tamora Pierce, and the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement in junior and young adult literature. Owen met with Kend at a coffeeshop in Kalispell, Montana, where a nearby young family alternated between being very excited about life (you'll hear that in the background) and sidling closer to hear this author expound on what it takes to publish successfully by kickstarter (or any other publishing route), how furries make an awesome fanbase, and the important role fantasy plays in shaping our internal and external worlds. You have our apologies for all of the background noise, but as to the rest? You're welcome. You're welcome to this instantly better life you now have with Jess E. Owen and her nuanced thoughts in it!

To learn more about Jess E. Owen, check out her website at http://www.jessowen.com, and we're going to make good on her many suggested TED talks by having her back in future podcasts. Join the #GryfonPride on Twitter at @authorjessowen!

And as for us? You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

Thanks for listening, wingbrothers and wingsisters!

What's more horrifying than the body? When it comes to body horror, deep-seated assumptions about who we are and on what we build our identities come to the fore. Some of those assumptions are unstintingly problematic. Others provide a crack through which fresh ideas can flourish. Authors as diverse as Octavia Butler, Jeff VanderMeer, Annalee Newitz, Ann Leckie, Brian K. Vaughan and Nnedi Okorafor have found new ways to infuse their works with fresh takes on body horror, and franchises as diverse as Alien, Star Trek, Twilight, Game of Thrones, Stargate SG-1, and The Magicians have become entangled with the subject.

This episode, we tangle with all the tangles. It's ruinous. It's messy. It's delightful.

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

Thanks for listening!

CATS.

You know they're there. On spaceships. In your Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom. Army crawling under rollercoasters. Sleeping in your bathroom sink that ONE TIME you forget to turn the light on when you want to wash your hands at night. And they're coming for you. They are ... CATS.

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

Thanks for listening!

Sometimes, when you read a really good book or watch a really good bit of media, you find yourself wanting to INHABIT the world you find there. Right? Everyone who grew up in the 90s wanted to go to Hogwarts. To go riding across the rolling hills of Rohan. To yell at Scotty (a bit unnecessarily, mind) to beam aboard the Enterprise.

In this episode of the Imaginaries Podcast, we take a long look at the top worlds we'd actually want to live in, and some of the reasons why they appeal so much to us as heart-homes. Here's a hint: Tony uses the worlds to get into thet whys, and Kend uses the whys to get into the worlds. Whether it's found families, points of view we connect with, characters we'd actually want to spend time with, post-capitalist utopias where we could actually afford medical care, or worlds where benevolent AIs take care of all the difficult stuff and leave us free to create, every world has a why, and every why has a world!

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

Thanks for listening!

[[RAW AUDIO WARNING: This episode consists mostly of raw audio in a classroom setting, so: maybe don't dial your stereos up to 11 on this one.]]

Many thanks to the University of Arizona MFA program for hosting us (well, hosting Tony and a laptop with Kend on Skype) last week! We are uploading the live audio as a plus-one podcast in advance of our scheduled weekly episode. The conversation was wide-ranging, but centered on our experiences as folks who got our MFAs and then had to grapple with SFF's weird relationship to the (note the big air quotes) "literary" establishment.

Our excellent hosts included UAMFA program director extraordinaire Ander Monson (findable on Twitter @angermonsoon & online at www.otherelectricities.com) and Chris Cokinos, whose cats are just plain excellent and whose books on meteorite hunting and vanished birds are mindblowing. Check 'em out, and enjoy the extra words this week!

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

Thanks for listening!

What does it mean to be gay in science fiction and fantasy? The question can be broken down into three major components: 1) What magic happens when SFF works include characters with same-sex attraction? 2) What magic happens when SFF works are written BY authors who experience same-sex attraction? And 3) what can we expect to see in texts both historical and contemporary when it comes to representation?

The history of same-sex attraction in SFF is, as you probably already know, fraught. In this episode, we discuss matters ranging from the Bury Your Gays trope to queerbaiting to "slash" pairings and fanfiction to the lack of representation in SFF anthologies to a whole long-ass list of books, comics, films, and television shows to watch out for (for both good and bad reasons, that is). It's a lot! And it's messy!

WARNING: This episode is VERY gay! It specifically tackles characters and authors from minority sexual orientations who have same-sex-oriented romantic and/or sexual attractions, not the full LGBTQIA+ rainbow community ... but that just means there's more to come.

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

Thanks for listening!

What role does religion play in science fiction and fantasy? What do we read into and what do we read *out* of a book written by an author of a known religious bent (think Orson Scott Card, C.S. Lewis, or Tolkien), or which features characters of a religious bent (think Mary Doria Russell or Tristan Palmgren)? Religion is something we can't get away from in 2018, whether we're talking about contemporary politics or science fiction or our own personal histories.

Get ready for some serious baggage inspection, folks: Kend is here with some rants on growing up religious, while Tony is here to be calm and the kind of emotional anchor we all need in our lives in 2018. What more could you want out of a podcast?

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

Thanks for listening!

What is orientalism, and why is it ... not a great thing to keep stumbling across in science fiction and fantasy? Better yet, what are some signs to watch out for that indicate you're writing orientalism into your latest book? We're here to talk about the history, the definition, the manifestations, and the long fight to combat orientalism in our most favorite of genres. But be ready! We don't exactly go easy on prized favorites of the genre.

You can find our back episodes on YouTube. Our Twitter handle is @imaginary_pod, our website www.imaginaries.net, and our email [email protected]. If you would like to help support our work, you can do so at www.ko-fi.com/imaginaries. And don't forget to vote on on our "What Should We Read Next?" lists on Goodreads! See our Twitter for more information on that.

Thanks for listening!