6.1: Ninefox Gambit pre-read w/ Ellie Bartels: Strategy War Games in Science Fiction
Late episode this week... but early episode this month! It's the Labor Day holiday weekend, so we wanted to post a longer episode to keep people company during all the BBQs and road trips.
This month, the book we're reading is the Locus-award winning Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee. We also have a wonderful guest. Ellie Bartels is a strategy & war game designer, and has long been book club pals with Adrian & Matt.
In this episode we discuss military science fiction, how science fiction and fantasy interact with each other, education game design, math, gender politics in the miliary & science fiction, and inter-departmental bureaucratic conflict. It is a really fun episode, and we have to leave some of the best parts for the spoiler discussion in a few weeks.
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Some of the works we mention & discuss include:
- The Ancillary Series by Anne Lieckie
- Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey
- CJ Cherryh
- Shards of Honor and Barrayar (collectively refered to as Cordelia's Honor) by Lois McMaster Bujold
- Honor Harrington by David Weber et al.
- Blindsight by Peter Watts
- Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolf
- Unavoidably, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
- And last but not least, "Instruments of Destruction", the short Star Wars fanfiction about project managing the Death Star
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Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.
