Podcasts

BristolCon Fringe – Emma & Pete Newman

~ Cheryl

Planetfall - Emma Newman

I have another set of BristolCon Fringe podcasts uploaded for you. Both readings are from forthcoming books, so this is an ideal opportunity to try before you buy.

First up we have Pete Newman reading from The Vagrant, forthcoming in the UK from Harper Voyager on April 23rd. Pete will be at Forbidden Planet in London on the 23rd, and in Bristol on the 30th. In the blub on Podbean I described the book as “science-fictional-post-demon-apocalypse” which pretty much sums it up. It certainly sounds very interesting.

Emma’s reading is from Planetfall, which is due out in the USA from Ace/Roc in November. It has an amazing cover (see above), which is even more amazing after you have heard Emma talk about it. I’m really excited about the book too. The chapters that Emma read totally got me hooked. Do I need to rant about the fact that Emma doesn’t have a UK publisher for it? You know the script by now, don’t you: “woman writing science fiction, no one in the UK will buy it”. *sigh*

Finally we have the Q&A, which focuses mainly on the issue of having two writers in the house. Do they kill each other? In fiction, in podcasts, or in real life? Honestly, people, would you marry a writer, knowing how neurotic they are?

I should add that Emma has recently had a recurrence of the health problems that plagued her last year. Further surgery will be required. Thankfully the NHS will cover the costs, but Emma’s earning ability will be seriously curtailed. This might be a very good time to support the Tea & Jeopardy podcast via Patreon. It is a very silly thing, and therefore needs to be continued.

A Cable Round Table

~ Cheryl

A while back I participated in a round table discussion on the subject of violence against women for the local newspaper, The Bristol Cable. The results of that have finally gone online (and I understand that there is something in the print edition too, though obviously not the audio). If you would like to listen to the discussion, just read the extracted quotes, or laugh at photos of me, you can find the article here.

By the way, while all of the other ladies who participated in the discussion are awesome in their own way, I was particularly impressed with Folami Prehaye of Victims of Internet Crime (VOIC). To react to revenge porn in as courageous and positive way as she has done is truly remarkable.

The Powell Brothers Do Fringe

~ Cheryl

I have been very remiss about posting BristolCon Fringe podcasts over the past few months. First there was Worldcon and Eurocon, then my mum being ill, then BristolCon itself, and soon after Christmas. It was not a good time. But I do need to get caught up because we have some really good material, starting with the December event. That featured Huw and Gareth Powell. Huw read from his middle grade book, Spacejackers, which is a rip-roaring adventure about Space Pirates. Gareth read from his latest (and now available) novel, Macaque Attack. This is the final book in the Ack-Ack Macaque series, so do take this last opportunity to hear the monkey being all violent and sweary. We totally earned that Explicit tag on iTunes, thank you, Gareth.

The event is hosted by Joanne Hall. Sound quality is not as good as I would like because there was some background clicking that I had to remove and it was just irregular enough for me to not be able to use Levelator without making things much worse. Next up, when I get the time, will be Emma & Pete Newman. And of course we have the February Fringe event happening next Monday (16th). That will feature John Hawkes-Reed (hopefully with programmable steam war elephants), and the rootin’ tootin’ Wild West genius of Stark Holborn.

Here ‘s Huw:

And Gareth:

And the Q&A:

New Writing

~ Cheryl

Last night (UK time) a new ebook appeared on the Twelfth Planet Press website. It is the Galactic Suburbia Scrapbook, which advertises itself as containing, “some of the highlights of 4 years and 100 episodes of Alex, Alisa and Tansy speaking to you from the Galactic Suburbs!” This is entirely true, however, it also contains various guest articles and pieces of feedback received by the show, and one of the guest articles is by me. The title of the article is, “Curse You, Tansy, I Bought Another One”, which probably gives you a good idea of what it is all about.

Naturally the book contains lots of other content, all of which is fabulous, so you can safely ignore the two pages of mine in it. All proceeds from the book go towards keeping Galactic Suburbia on air, which is a very fine cause. You can buy it here.

Also, my latest column for Bristol 24/7 has just gone live. It is about trolls. The boring kind, not the nice Nordic creatures.

Promoting Afrofuturist Writers

~ Cheryl

With a film on black science fiction writers due up on Wednesday, I was keen to do as much as I could to promote all of my fabulous friends. And as I have a whole pile of interviews with black writers, I could offer the Watershed some really great content. I’m pleased to say that they accepted, and my article, complete with lots of embedded audio, is now online.

Obviously I haven’t been able to mention everyone. I’ve stuck mainly to people who have novels out. But I’ve mentioned a lot of anthologies as well so hopefully the net will spread more widely.

And if you are in Bristol on Wednesday, do come along. The film has rare footage of Chip Delany and Octavia Butler, and I believe that the supporting short is Pumzi.

New Salon Futura Interview – Rhonda Garcia

~ Cheryl

Lex Talionis - Rhonda GarciaIn the spirit of the Afrofuturism season at The Watershed, I have busied myself to finish editing the full version of my Ujima Radio interview with Rhonda Garcia. She’s a writer from Trinidad whose debut novel, Lex Talionis, is available from Dragonwell Publishing and the usual outlets. I’ve read the book, and found it a nice piece of fast-paced space opera adventure, though with a content warning for extreme sexual abuse which Rhonda and I discuss (in theory, not in detail) during the podcast. It is well worth looking at, unless you are the sort of person likely to be very upset by such things.

I have an interview with Tobias Buckell that I need to get sorted, after which I think I will have the full set of Caribbean SF&F authors with novels out. Clearly more people need to write books. For those of you who may not have listened to the others, you can find them as follows:

And here’s the audio player for Rhonda:

Memories of Ã…con 7

~ Cheryl

The latest issue of Tähtivaeltaja was waiting for me when I got home this evening. It includes a lengthy article about Karen Lord, illustrated in part with pictures from her Guest of Honor stint at Ã…con 7. The one below was taken by Tero Ykspetäjä, who kindly sent me a copy. It was taken during Karen’s interview, which you can listen to here.

Karen Lord & Me

Trans Pride Podcasts

~ Cheryl

The last of the broadcast material from my Trans Pride coverage aired last Thursday so I am free to podcast the full, unedited version. This has the full interviews with Fox & Lewis, with Nicole Gibson, and with Bethany Black. It also has several more interviews, the whole of the opening address by Caroline Lucas, MP, and lots of vox pops. The magazine article mentioned by Sam towards the end of the show can be found at WHM Magazine.

Alice Denny’s poem, “Normal/Questions”, deserves a podcast all of its own. Alice only got one take, as is a little emotional towards the end. Also we got heckled by seagulls. However, there’s no mistaking the raw power of the words.

Kathryn Allan – Accessing the Future

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I recorded an interview with Kathryn Allan, who is co-editing the Accessing the Future anthology with Djibril al-Ayad of The Future Fire. The anthology will focus on themes of disability in science fiction. We also talk about how Kathryn came to be the current recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship (and a quick shout out here to Margaret McBride who is indeed awesome as Kathryn says).

The sound quality is slightly ropey at my end, which is probably because I forget to cover up the big, flat screens around here with something soft. I really do need a home studio. However, we seem to have avoided picking up the person using a powered trimmer next door throughout much of the recording, which is a big relief.

Disability activism is an area that I’m not very familiar with, so if I have inadvertently used inappropriate language please accept my apologies in advance (and do suggest how I could do better). Apologies also for keeping bringing the discussion back to trans issues, but that’s what I know and hopefully it does make it clear how intersectional all this stuff is.

When you have had a listen, please go and back the anthology project.

Update: Who forgot the embed link. *headsmack*

July Fringe Readings

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The podcasts for the July BristolCon Fringe events are now available.

First up we have YA author, Andy Goodman. Andy writes mainly for boys, and we’ll come back to the issue of gendered marketing during the Q&A. His reading is from the start of his novel, Tiberius Found.

The second reader was Ken Shinn, whose only current publication is in Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. You may remember that he read from that back in February. Ken’s story is about summoning demons, and Benny Hill, and a drunken otter. Ken was supposed to be on first, but he got stuck in traffic. Andy commented afterwards that he was very glad he didn’t have to follow Ken.

The Q&A turned out to be very interesting because we got into a conversation about gendered marketing of YA books. Andy assured us that publishers are moving away from this now, at least in part because they have discovered that the kids don’t like it. This is very good news.

Also in the Q&A, Pete Sutton and I talk about the fabulous Small Stories: Big Books event that we are curating with Ann & Jeff VanderMeer for the end of August. Last I looked there were only 5 places left (out of 50), which is really pleasing. I’ll be talking to Nat from the Small Stories group on Ujima on Wednesday, so expect more coverage of the event then.

Hopefully you’ll notice an improvement in the audio quality this month. We got to use the new amp that Jo bought, and a wired microphone. This cut out a lot of the crackle. We are still sorting out how to best record direct from the amp, which will hopefully improve things further. There was actually a lot of noise from the air conditioning that night, but because it was very predictable noise I was able to clean it out.

As Claire notes in the Q&A, the next Fringe event is on August 18th, when I’ll be in London at Worldcon. I’m not sure yet what is happening with recordings for that.

By the way, I’m pleased to see that listener figures for these podcasts continue to go up. That means that last month’s readers, Pete Sutton and David Rodger, have the biggest audiences, outstripping Gareth Powell and the Flash session with me in it. Gareth will be back with his new novel in a few months, so I’m sure he’ll get his crown back soon. We broke 900 listeners last month. I’m looking forward to hitting the thousand. FYI, around 32% of the audience is from the USA, and 28% from the UK. Finland is the next biggest market, followed by Sweden and Australia.

America, Meet Tigerman

~ Cheryl

Nick Harkaway’s brilliant novel, Tigerman, launches in the USA today. Nick talks about it on John Scalzi’s Big Idea here. And if you want to know more you can listen to the interview I did with Nick for Ujima Radio.

Nick and I touch on a number of issues, including fatherhood, comics, geopolitics, men being daft, famous fathers and why writers never grow up.

A Brief Booker Comment

~ Cheryl

The Longlist for the 2014 Booker Prize has been announced. This year the prize has been opened up to inhabitants of the rebellious former colonies of North America, as well as citizens of the Commonwealth, presumably as an act of forgiveness by the Booker people for the treasonous behavior of their forebears. The British literary establishment is in something of a tizzy over this, predicting the Death of the Novel, Barbarians at the Gates and the End of Civilization As We Know It. “Whatever next,” said well known critic J.M., “will they be letting in science fiction? Or the French?”

However, one effect of this change to the Booker rules has been the presence of Karen Joy Fowler’s wonderful We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves on the Longlist. You can read my review here, and listen to my interview with Karen here.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks is also on the list, despite the fact that it won’t be published until September. I must try to get a copy before his appearance at Mr. B’s.

Leah Moore Interview

~ Cheryl

I have just uploaded the full version of the interview with Leah Moore than I made while I was in Liverpool. In addition to the material that we broadcast on Ujima Radio, this version contains a discussion of the Electricomics venture that she has started with (amongst others) her father and her husband, John Reppion, with the support of the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.

For more information about Electricomics see their website, or follow them on Twitter and Facebook.

The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts is a £7 million fund from Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Nesta to support collaboration between arts projects, technology providers and researchers to explore the potential of increasing audience engagement or find new business models. Separate Digital R&D Fund for the Arts are being run in Wales and in Scotland.

DRD logo

Fringe Special at Word of Mouth

~ Cheryl

Once a year the BristolCon crowd takes over Word of Mouth, a monthly reading series run by Tangent Books and hosted by the Thunderbolt pub. Normally we’d put these readings on the BristolCon Fringe podcast stream, but that has limited capacity and these readings turned out to be quite long, so they are being hosted by Salon Futura instead.

The three readers are Pete Sutton, Joanne Hall and Scott Lewis. In Part 1 Pete’s story is a rare (for him) science fiction piece. Jo reads from her latest novel, The Art of Forgetting: Nomad. And Scott reads the first part of a steampunk horror story that will conclude in Part 2.

In part 2 Joanne Hall reads from a currently unsold novel, The Summer Goddess. Pete Sutton reads a story from a collection he is writing in which each story is inspired by the counting magpies folk song. Scott Lewis reads the rest of the story that he started in Part 1. It goes on a little, but we were all on the edge of our seats and encouraged Scott to read the whole thing rather than leave us wondering.

My thanks to Richard Jones of Tangent for inviting us to read, and to Dave from the Thunderbolt for being a fine host.

June Fringe Podcasts

~ Cheryl

The audio from the June Fringe meeting is now online. I continue to cringe about the sound quality, but Jo has recently invested in a new amp, so hopefully the next set of readings will be much better.

David J. Rodger was our first reader. He presented a Cthulhu Mythos tale set in Nazi-occupied Norway during WWII. David is clearly aware that all Finns are evil witches.

Pete Sutton gave us a quick peek at a novel he is writing, featuring seven Crusader knights. He followed that by another of his magpie stories.

Finally we have the traditional Q&A.

There are lots of things arising from that which require notes.

When Pete mentions that Jo writes Grimdark he is, of course, referring to our own Joanne Hall, not that Abercrombie fellow who doesn’t have nearly the same body count.

We mention that Pete read another magpie story at something called Word of Mouth. I do have the audio from that, but it turned out to be too long for the BristolCon podbean account (without upgrading) so I’m going to run it on Salon Futura.

David makes mention of something called BRP. That’s Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system, which formed the core of all of the rule sets they produced back in the day.

If you’d like to know more about David’s work with the Cthulhu Mythos, he has a guest post about it on Pete’s blog. I’d like to have a much longer chat with him about how you use the Mythos these days. A pub event after he’d had a few beers was not the right time to do it.

The deadly Call of Cthulhu scenario that David refers to is “Roots” by Simon Brake which appears in the collection, Things We Leave Behind from Stygian Fox.

And finally, Wikipedia has little to say about alternative versions of the magpie song, other than to confirm Pete’s assertion that the version he is using is older than the one used by the TV programme.

Liverpool Coverage Elsewhere

~ Cheryl

This isn’t new material. All of the interviews I have from the Unstraight Conference in Liverpool are on the podcast. However, a few people have kindly asked to use parts of that material elsewhere.

First up, Mary Milton took an edit of material to create a report focused on the April Ashley exhibition for Shout Out last Thursday. That show is available as a podcast here.

In addition the folks at the Tom of Finland Foundation have posted my interview with Durk Dehner on their blog.

Many thanks to both of them for the additional signal boost.

I note also that Durk and Homotopia were at Helsinki Pride yesterday. It looks like it was a great event, and it was lovely to see my LGBT contacts and science fiction contacts both reporting from the same event on Twitter.

Karen Lord Interview

~ Cheryl

Continuing my catch-up of audio material (at least I hope it is catch-up because I seem to be generating it at a ridiculous rate), today I have posted the audio for my interview with Karen Lord at Ã…con 7. As I said in my con report, I wasn’t supposed to be doing this, but ended up being an Emergency Holographic Interviewer due to unfortunate circumstances elsewhere. Thankfully Karen is ridiculously easy to interview.

Tech services at Ã…con are provided by Jonas Wissting to whom I am indebted for this recording.

Ã…con 7 – The Post-Colonial SF Panel

~ Cheryl

Here is the first of my podcasts from Ã…con 7. It is a panel about post-colonial SF. The panelists are: Karen Lord, Sari Polvinen, Juha Tupasela & me.

I noted while editing it that I totally derailed Sari’s question about classic SF that counted as post-colonial, for which my apologies.

Tech services at Ã…con are provided by Jonas Wissting to whom I am indebted for this recording.

Unstraight Conference – The Interviews

~ Cheryl

I have done a podcast of the various interviews I did at the Unstraight Conference in Liverpool last weekend (see here and here).

As you might expect, mostly I talked to people about the April Ashley exhibition, but hopefully it will be of general interest.

The people interviewed are:

  • Janet Dugdale – Director of the Museum of Liverpool
  • Gary Everett – Director of Homotopia
  • Bev Ayre – Project Director for the April Ashley exhibition
  • Jenny-Ann Bishop – a local trans activist
  • Sara Davidman – a photographic artist who works with trans people
  • Surat Knan – Project Manager for Rainbow Jews
  • Sarah Blackstock – Heritage Project Manager for LGBT Birmingham
  • Michael Fürst – Schwules Museum*, Berlin
  • Durk Dehner – Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles

My thanks to them all for their time.

For anyone coming to this blog because of the conference, my podcast feed for gender-related material can be found here.

Fringe in a Flash Podcasts

~ Cheryl

Girl at the end of the World: Vol 2Yes, it is podcast overload this week. But hey, we have some good writers; and me.

The April Fringe event was organized for us by the ever-busy Kevlin Henney, Bristol’s Mister Flash. It was devoted entirely to flash fiction, and as such had far more than the usual number of readers. In fact we had eight. The evening was split into three parts, the first two with four readers each, and the final section being the Q&A. That’s how I have edited the podcasts.

We did have a slight technical issue on the night, which resulted in my having to spend the first session stood in front of the readers with a recorder. Thankfully this does not seem to have put them off. Normal service was resumed for the rest of the event. The main consequence of this was that, in the absence of any amplification, we picked the people with the loudest voices to go first.

Pauline Masurel entertained us with a couple of cosmologically-themed stored, including one involving Professor Brian Cox doing something he has never done before: get pregnant.

Jonathan Pinnock has a very disturbing tale involving collecting an unusual order from a butcher.

Jonathan L. Howard read a story from his GOON SQUAD series of stories about a special operations police unit from Manchester who happen to be superheroes. You’ll never see werewolves in the same light again.

And finally Kevlin Henney treated us to the true story of Little Red Riding Hood.

At the start of part 2 Louise Gethin read us a story about the secret lives of garden gnomes.

Then there was me. The piece I read is called “The Dragon’s Maw”, and it will be appearing in The Girl at the End of the World: Vol. 2, forthcoming from Fox Spirit later this year (cover above). It is sort of a mash-up of Assyrian mythology and quantum physics. This is the first time I’ve ever read my own fiction in public, and I can see from the recording that I don’t have sufficient confidence in my voice to do dramatic readings. Anyway, as far as my fiction goes, this is not awful. On the way to Finland I showed it to Liz Hand and John Clute, and they did not laugh.

Next up is Justin Newland with a story about hell inspired by the card for The Devil in the tarot deck. Justin will be back for the May reading with something a little longer.

And finally we have Pete Sutton with a creepy story about having a little brother.

With so many readers the Q&A subjects varied far and wide, but we finally settled down to talk about writing; in particular how and why one would want to write flash in preference to any other length.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy it all. The next Fringe event is on Monday (May 19th), and I’ll do a post about that later in the week.