A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou – Episode 2

What was the show on Resonance after you? It was another round table chat affair involving at least one guy with a North American accent. I dozed off* towards the end of A Slug and woke up in the middle of this other show. I was highly confused for a good ten minutes.

*forgive me, I have a cold and was v. tired

Another excellent episode, guys. Thank you!

BTW: a pousse café is a fancy-pants cocktail made up of layered liqueurs that float one atop the other without mixing. You would drink it after dinner, and it would “push [down] the coffee.”

Sinker: I was just about to fire off an indignant reply to your comment, but as I think about it, you’re probably right – although not for the reasons you think you are. I love love love Gene Wolfe, but he’s such a one-off – such a singular figure in terms of how he approaches SF and how he conceives of what it is and what it does – that trying to trace his “place” in science fiction (even when he himself provides a roadmap, as he does in some of his essays) is only going to lead down unprofitable tangents. He is of SF but not in it, might be one way to put it.

a more serious reason: i suppose in a way eli and i are very much angling, as the project behind slugs, to defend the short story as the basic unit of a certain era’s expressive value — which will inevitably leave us looking leerily at the “trilogy of triologies” types: nothing wrong with long books in long rows, maybe, BUT we want to dig a bit into what got lost