Episode 717: Activism, reviewing, books to look forward to, and a little about the weather

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.

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Episode 717: Activism, reviewing, books to look forward to, and a little about the weather is an episode from The Coode Street Podcast by Jonathan Strahan & Gary K. Wolfe.

This episode is 62:53 long.

This episode was published on Feb 8, 2026.

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