Episode 719: Ishiguro, Dinniman, and genre expectations in story

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.

You can listen to Episode 719: Ishiguro, Dinniman, and genre expectations in story online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Episode 719: Ishiguro, Dinniman, and genre expectations in story is an episode from The Coode Street Podcast by Jonathan Strahan & Gary K. Wolfe.

This episode is 61:20 long.

This episode was published on Mar 8, 2026.

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