Book Lovers Series

Book Lovers: Episode 5

Episode 5: Ted Chiang & N.K. Jemisin

August 16, 2020


On this episode, Carmanita officially joins Booklovers as a cohost! To celebrate, we discuss two short story collections by award-winning master speculative fiction authors N.K. Jemisin and Ted Chiang. We open with an attempt at defining speculative fiction and then shift to discuss both collections in a general way before finding threads of commonality and contrast across pairs of stories. We close with a discussion of some of our favorite stories from both collections. Come for the dialogue and comity, stay for the publishing awards hot takes and a hilarious anecdote about Tamagotchi.




Titles discussed:

  • How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin
  • Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
  • Circe by Madeleine Miller
  • The Odyssey by Homer (Jess recommends the Robert Fagles translation)
  • Kindred by Octavia Butler
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  • All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
  • Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve
  • Vox: “How conservatives took over sci-fi’s most prestigious award”, an overview of the Sad Puppies campaign
  • Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
  • Borne and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
  • Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland
  • Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington
  • The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
  • Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  • Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  • Dune by Frank Herbert
  • The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
  • Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
  • Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman
  • Get in Trouble: Stories by Kelly Link
  • BoJack Horseman
  • This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal al-Mohtar