Our guest this week is the remarkable Kemi Ashing-Giwa, whose new novel The King Must Die is out in November. We talk about science fantasy—or whether genre labels mean much at all to the new generation of writers—her own influences, her well-received first novel, the space opera The Splinter in the Sky, and even her current scientific work on mass extinctions and the loss of her family home in the California wildfires earlier this year.

As always, our thanks to Kemi for making time to talk to us today, and we hope you enjoy the episode.

This week we have a lively conversation with the remarkable Ken Liu, whose new thriller All That We See or Seem introduces a new protagonist, the gifted hacker Julia Z, in a tale that explores the growing role of AI, the possibility of a technology of shared dreams, a variety of near-future surveillance tech, and some pretty fearful players with even more fearful schemes. A dramatic shift from his epic fantasy/historical world of the Dandelion Dynasty series or the earlier classic short stories, it seems to represent an exciting new dimension in Ken’s career.

In a rare shorter episode, we chat about the late and much missed Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, with whom Jonathan and Gary had strangely similar encounters some years ago, and her early career as an SF writer before her decades-long success with her Saint-Germain series of vampire novels. That leads, briefly, to considering midlist vs. niche authors, before we get into some of the odd features of American copyright law as revealed by the recent Anthropic AI settlement.