The Coode Street Podcast

This week, Jonathan and Gary sit down and talk some new and forthcoming books, including our mutual choices for favorite book of the year so far.

Gary starts by describing a book which he just finished and found particularly moving: The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, Christopher Priest and Nina Allan, which he says reads more like a novel than a biography, with Priest’s final illness becoming a significant theme in portions written by Allan. They also discuss The Recollections: Fragments from a Life in Writing, a collection of Priest's writings from Briardene Books.

Gary then goes on to recommend Frances Spufford's Nonesuch as his book of the year so far, Jonathan recommends S.L. Huang’s new novella The Language of Liars and then talks about what it’s like to reread The Fellowship of the Ring after a long tome.  

Of course, there are the usual digressions into things like the New Wave, the popularity of romantasy, the immense length of some literary classics, and other matters.

As always, we hope you enjoy the episode!

With Gary away at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Florida, and celebrating his 80th birthday (!!!!!), Jonathan sat down to chat with Alexandra Pierce and Ian Mond about why we read books, why we talk about and review them, and three great new books from 2026 that we loved.

Along the way, we talked about Johanna Bell's The Department of the Vanishing, S.L. Huang's The Language of Liars, and Francis Spufford's Nonesuch, which led to the spontaneous inaugural meeting of The Totally Temporary Book Club, because by sheer chance all three had read and loved it.

The books in this episode are:

Johanna Bell's The Department of the Vanishing;

S.L. Huang's The Language of Liars; and 

Francis Spufford's Nonesuch.

As usual, Jonathan and Gary raise a number of thorny questions about reading SF and fantasy, and resolve none of them.

Beginning with Jonathan’s account of his recent reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, we speculate on what sort of expectations we bring as readers to novels in which the interiority of the characters is privileged over the SF elements, whether a novel can do both, and whether the reading protocols are different for different genres.

This leads toward a customarily rambling discussion that touches upon everything from Jo Walton and Ada Palmer’s new nonfiction book Trace Elements to novels by Le Guin, Wolfe, Bujold and others, and eventually leads us to a consideration of Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl novels, along with books we’re either reading right now or looking forward to in the next few weeks.

Today Jonathan and Gary are joined by Nebula, World Fantasy,  and five-time Hugo Award winner Michael Swanwick to discuss the origins of some of his stories, the life and craft of the professional writer, and his extraordinary new short story collection, The Universe Box.

As always, our thanks to Michael for making time to talk to us. We hope you enjoy the conversation!

As always, the Coode Street Motel Six bestrides continents, so after briefly comparing notes on the weather in Perth and Chicago, Gary and Jonathan get down to it and chat about the subjects of the moment.

 
How do you talk about books and what was the weather like?
The importance of settings in fiction, especially regarding climate and weather, and the broader question of whether readers can ever fully appreciate a setting dissimilar to their own and how book reviewers might take this into account. This includes a brief discussion of translated fiction—a welcome new category in this year’s Locus Awards.
 
Anthologies and activism
The significance of advocacy anthologies that may reflect anything from feminist SF (as in Vonda McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson’s Aurora: Beyond Equality (1976) to antiwar works to promoting the New Wave. 
 
Books we’re looking forward to
In a new segment,  we list a few books that we are looking forward to that will be published in the coming weeks.
 
Jonathan talks about A.G. Slatter's A Forest, Darkly, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Pretenders to the Throne of God, Paul McAuley's Loss Protocol, and A.D Sui's debut The Iron Garden Sutra.
 
Gary’s list includes  Rebecca Roanhorse’s River of Bones and Other Stories and The Best of Adrian Tchaikovsky, a novella by Ian McDonald, Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur, and nonfiction study of SFF by Ada Palmer and Jo Walton, Trace Elements: Conversations on the Project of Science Fiction and Fantasy.