Spectology: The Science Fiction Book Club Podcast

Today Adrian is joined by Will Frank, this year's Hugo Awards Administrator, to talk all things Hugos. We discuss why you might want to nominate and vote for the Hugos, how exactly to get membership to do so (anyone can do it!), the special Video Game award, and why recent events that might have turned some people off will hopefully not be repeated this year. 

I was really happy Will came on, and found it really fascinating to learn about how the Hugos actually work behind the scene, and the people like Will who actually count votes and work hard to make the Hugos happen. I appreciate him taking some challenging questions from me about past Hugos and how things are improving. I also was really happy to learn about how to volunteer in the Hugos, something I hadn't considered as an option before but is open to everyone.

This came about through Olav at the wonderful Hugo Book Club blog after hearing my In Conversation: How & Why to Vote for the Hugo Awards episode, so many thanks to them for putting this together.

Finally, this is our first episode after a long hiatus! More are to come very soon, Matt is back in the recording studio and we'll be doing our podcast finale & wrap-up over the next month or so, along with some returning guests. 

Links:

Worldcon for general & historical Hugo information: https://www.worldcon.org
DisCon III for nominating & voting, and attending memberships: https://discon3.org 
Volunteering: https://discon3.org/get-involved/volunteer/ 
Memberships: https://discon3.org/membership/membership-information/ 

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

A quick bonus episode this week, with Matt & Adrian discussing their favorite Aliens in science fiction and beyond. We revisit some books we've read for the pod, talk about some classics, and hit on a few under-represented gems. We hope you like it! 

A bit late, sorry about that! Quarantine time is weird. I'll try to get around to listing everything we talk about later but I want to get this out first: if there's anything in particular you'd like to get a link to, let me know at @spectologypod on twitter & I'll get it to you.

We'll be back next week with our post-read of The Tea Master & The Detective with Julia Rios! 

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

To find links to all the books we've read, check us out on Bookshop.

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Really short bonus/emergency episode today. Adrian is on his own and off-script, giving you the insider scoop on how to nominate & vote in the Hugo Awards, as well as why you might want to. 

Short answer: go to https://members.conzealand.nz/memberships and sign up for the "Supporting Membership". This will allow you to vote on the 2020 Hugo Awards, and nominate works for the 2021 Hugo Awards next year. For more general information, check out the Hugos website https://www.thehugoawards.org/i-want-to-vote/ which offers evergreen information on how to sign up for a membership any given year (it changes).

This is something I'm passionate about, but if it's not your scene that's OK! But I hope you'll give me the chance to make the case that voting in the Hugo Awards is worthwhile.

We'll be back next week with our regular programing, in this case the Memory Called Empire post-read.

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

This week's minisode is an in-depth discussion of ONLY the title story from Ted Chiang's new collection, Exhalation (https://amzn.to/2RlWfVY). The story "Exhalation" is available for free online at Lightspeed magazine (https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/), so we thought we'd start with this to whet everyone's appetite, and give new readers a chance to read something by Chiang to decide whether you want to pick up the full book. 

We dig apart Matt's experience of re-reading this story (something he rarely does), discuss the meaty themes the story presents, and offer a few other stories about the process of science. It's a fun short episode, and we hope you enjoy it & stick around for next week's full dissection of all the other stories in the collection. 

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We'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter at @spectologypod, sending us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submitting the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

This is an ongoing series we do every few months, going over some of the pop culture stuff we've liked recently. Some of it is SF adjacent, some of it isn't, but it's all good and enjoyable!

Matt's things: 

- Terrace House (Japanese reality TV, available on Netflix) 

- Thunder Bay (true crime podcast)

- Universal Beings by Makaya McCraven (jazz album: check out Natalie Weiner's review)

Adrian's things:

- Zelda: Breath of the Wild (video game: check out Austin Walker's review)

- Blank Check with Griffin & David (movie podcast)

- One Dapper Street (men's fashion youtube channel)

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We'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter at @spectologypod, sending us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submitting the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Two quick announcements today, since we weren't able to get our usual pre-read episode recorded in time.

The first is that our November book will be Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This is a book neither of us has read, but won the Clarke award and has themes that we're both interested in. Should be a good time.

The second is that Adrian guest hosted on the Hugos There Podcast (https://hugospodcast.com) a few days ago to talk about Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. It was a great conversation about one of his favorite books, so check that out if you need something to tide you over before our Children of Time pre-read drops next week. 

Final bonus announcement for our Americans who read the show notes: VOTE! This is voting day, and there are a bunch of important local elections on the ballot, from your state legislators to various criminal justice ballot reforms to just your local sheriffs & judges. We live in a dystopian hellscape, but you can make it mildly better by voting. And you can listen to me talk about Le Guin while you wait on line. 

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As always, we'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter at @spectologypod, sending us an email at mailbox@spectology.com. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Welcome back friends, it's been a while! Adrian & Matt are back from our break, happy to bring you our hottest takes on what we've been enjoying recently. And next week we'll have our post-read Episode for Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, so you should read that & listen to our last episode if you haven't yet. 

This week we cover:

- MeasuredPolitics.org, Adrian's Political Action Committee
- Mike Boyd's YouTube channel, where he documents his process learning random skills
- Bojack Horseman, a show about a depressed actor / horse on Netflix
- The Cheese & the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg
- America City by Chris Beckett
- Jack Ryan, a TV show on Amazon

We'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter at @spectologypod, sending us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submitting the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Adrian & Matt are together for a short episode going over some of their favorite books, movies, video games, and podcasts of recent. We each discuss three things that we're excited to share with each other and all of you! They are:

- Making Obama, a podcast from WBEZ Chicago

- Sorry to Bother You, a movie from Boots Riley (see it in theatres!)

- Japanese Style Originator, available on Netflix

- Chrono Trigger, available on Steam, iOS, Android, etc

- The Invisible Valley by Su Wei, trans. Austin Woerner, Small Beer Press

- The Reading the End Bookcast, a podcast from the demographically similar Jennys

As always, we post these links and more at our twitter account, @spectologypod. We'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter or sending us an email at mailbox@spectology.com. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

What is a spoiler? Why do we care about them? How do different people react to them? Do fan communities police spoilers too much? If a spoiler makes you like something more, is it really a spoiler? 

This week, Matt and Adrian talk about their own reading habits and how they think about "spoilers" both in their own reading, and when interacting with others. 

This episode is part of a new series we're calling "In Conversation", shorter episodes where we talk about one topic in the SFF world. Sometimes we'll have a guest, and sometimes it'll just be us. 

We always love hearing from listeners, but for these In Conversation episodes we're particularly keen to start a conversation! So please let us know what you think. Tweet us at @spectologypod, submit the episode at r/printSF, or email us at mailbox@spectology.com with your thoughts about the topic.

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Do we have a great episode for you today oh boy! 

As a coda to our series on Binti and Afrofuturism, we invited Caribbean SF author Tobias Buckell to teach us about science fiction from the islands. Tobias has a patreon at patreon.com/tobiasbuckell, which you should check out if you enjoy this episode, and find him on twitter at @tobiasbuckell.

We mention a lot of books, stories and more in this episode. Links are below or at our website, spectology.com, if they don't show up in your podcatcher.

Three Stories Tobias had us read before the discussion:
- Toy Planes by Tobias S. Buckell
- The Glass Bottle Trick by Nalo Hopkinson
- Redemption in Indigo (excerpt) by Karen Lord

Two other stories of Tobias' that we discuss:
- Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance
- Shoggoths in Traffic

Two reviews of his work that explain Tobias' caribbean themes well:
- Space Rastas by Lisa Allen-Agostini (review of Raggamuffin)
- The Shock of the New Normal by Nisi Shawl (review of Hurricane Fever)

Other Caribbean authors & books:
- An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
- The Black God's Drums (pre-order) by P. Djèlí Clark
- Karen Lord, including the anthology New Worlds, Old Ways
- Brandon O'Brien's twitter and short stories
- Lex Talionis by RAS Garcia
- Nalo Hopkinson
- Gemsigns by Stephanie Saulter
- Buffalo Soldier by Maurice Broaddus
- And also check out CaribbeanSF.com for more of Tobias' recommendations.

Finally, some non-fiction works that have influenced Tobias' work:
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report
- US Navy Climate Change Roadmap
- Women in Grenadian History, 1783-1983 by Nicole Laurine Phillip (as presented at the USVI Lit Fest)

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Finally, we announced our next book: The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Eliott. Stay tuned for our pre-read discussion on that next week.

As always, we'd love to hear from you! Tweet us at @spectologypod, submit the episode at r/printSF, or email us at mailbox@spectology.com with your thoughts about the book.

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art. And a big thanks again to Tobias for chatting with us, make sure to hit up his Patreon for original SF stories each month.