S&L Podcast - #540 - A Court of Coif and Sushi
/Sword and Laser is having a meetup at LaCon! Plus, Fable gets popular, ACoTaR has new titles and our non-spoilery thoughts on This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me.
WHAT ARE WE NOMMING?
Tom: Spinach Ravioli
Veronica: Tomatoes
STARTING IN SEPTEMBER
Sword and Laser simplified tiers. Monthly:
$5 Shieldbearers - Ad-free (Raise the price but leave existing tier folks at $3)
$10 - Laserswordmaster Book Briefing (Raise the price for new members only) Knighthood-Space Marine is retired and becomes Laserswordmaster.
$20 Space Knight Special Thing We Need to Come Up With. Quarterly free gift? (I have some old merch, could do a Forthwall store and send them things. OOh I like custom merch. They get it and everybody else can buy it)
Themed gift for the monthly read
Monthly video conference
$50 - Primal You get to suggest book picks and weigh in with opinions on picks ahead of time. We make a special Doc they have access to where we each keep a list of books we're thinking of. You get to join the Discord hangout voiced.
CONTENT
First Wednesday of the Month (or the second if schedules conflict): Record Quick Burns, Book Kick Off and Book Wrap up. (Patrons get all this at once. Public gets it doled out in two episodes)
Once a month on another Wednesday: Hangout and check in with the Discord. This is recorded and posted for Patrons.
QUICK BURNS
Any news or announcements
Jan: The 2026 Dragon Awards Ballot has been announced. Nominees for the Best Science Fiction Novel are:
The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey
Radiant Star by Ann Leckie
Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman
Slow Gods by Claire North
The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi
God’s Junk Drawer by Peter Clines
And as Best Fantasy Novel:
Red City by Marie Lu
Queen Demon by Martha Wells
Academy of Outcasts by Larry Correia
Hell to Pay by Sherrilyn Kenyon
The Lost Reliquary by Lyndsay Ely
Twelve Months by Jim Butcher Read more at File 770
Jan: Clarion West has announced their "2026 Deep Dive Series" pairing a speculative fiction author with a scientist or other expert in a moderated conversation. The first one is September 12 with Mary Robinette Kowal and former commercial astronaut Dr. Sian Proctor about "the current state of global space programs and our possible futures among the stars" The second one is September 24 with Author T. Kingfisher and naturalist Daniel Winkler who will discuss "fungus to slime molds, and nature’s lessons in collapse, renewal, and connection—sometimes sticky, sometimes horrifying, always a little weird." The events are hybrid with locations situated in Seattle and the streaming link being 5 dollars. Link
Jan: Via File 770: E. J. Swift won the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel 'When There Are Wolves Again', a near-future SF novel about "environmental change and possible recovery". The novel beat the other five finalists, including Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl. Link
Jan: Audible has announced the launch of an audible exclusive audiobook for November 5th called “Exoplanet,” a sci-fi thriller executive produced by Andy Weir and written by comic book author and novelist Benjamin Percy. The cast includes Anthony Mackie and John Leguizamo. From Audible: "When the starship Wild Blue Yonder is torn apart by a quantum anomaly, each surviving crew member crash-lands in a different era on the same deadly exoplanet — hunted, alone and running out of time. [...] Separated by centuries, the crew must find a way to communicate across time itself before this world consumes them all." Variety Link
Spriggana: Murderbot Season 2 cast will include Steve Buscemi, Wanda Sykes, Patton Oswalt, Martha Plimpton, Bridget Everett, Michael Sheen, Tramell Tillman, Blair Underwood and Brendan Hunt. Deadline Link
terpkristin: ACoTaR books 6 and 7 have titles and some descriptions to whet certain appetites. Today Link
trpw: I went to see the stage version of The Hunger Games in London. Quick TL;DR it was a well done show but I only went when I could get a large discount on the cheapest seats. I don't think that I would have enjoyed it as much if I'd had to pay full price for more regular seats.
Tamahome: Fable membership growing to 5 million users (how many 150 million Goodreads users are active?). (Women seem to dominate book clubs.) Publishers Weekly Link
Tamahome: Kindle Short Reads. Scifi & fantasy you can read in 90 minutes (there's other minute lengths—15,30,45,60,120) (included with Prime or 99¢). I've been wanting "movie length" reads. Wish I could list scifi only. Amazon Link
Elizabeth and Tamahome: Ebooks are coming to libro.fm in some markets! This includes using credits to buy either audio or ebook editions, and syncing between editions if you have both. No timeline, I just got a hype email. They will arrive by 2027, offering a competitor to Amazon that supports over 5,000 independent bookstores. Libro.fm Blog Link
BARE YOUR SWORD
Feedback from the audience Sword and Laser Meetup at WorldCon LAConV in Anaheim on Thursday August 27th in the Monterey room in the Hilton starting at 9 PM
Tamahome: What does it mean to executive produce an audiobook?
Trike: You get to pick the snacks.
Jan: You get paid by slapping your name on it because the real writer is not well known enough?
Stephen: Hate to tell you this, but I did a quick re-read or re listen of the Bobiverse series because there is a new one coming out September 10, The Infinite Extent. Thank you short book A Midnight Pastry Shop Called Hwawoldang. It got an extra star just for being short. My Laser challenge is going way over. What I meant by the Mary Sue and the four doorways comment is that the 4 doorways is a much nicer way to explain why you did not like a book. The literary equivalence of an "It's not you, It's Me" criticism.
Ruth: Good to hear another K-pop bop on the show. I think the hosts should introduce a new section where they talk about the music they’re listening to and sing a few lines.
Paul: What fun questions! (Though I can't find the convo in discord so I'll share my answers here) And really, this is what I look for in SFF: A way of seeing the world that I never imagined, so for "Books that changed my view of the world," I could probably list dozens, but I'll just share the first three that come to mind:
The Gods Themselves - my first read that explored the multiverse, a concept I occasionally obsess over still. Also, I was a philosophy student at the time, and I found it an surprisingly strong defense of David Hume b/c it posits "What if all life in our universe was an accident caused by blob monsters having an orgy?"
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia - Made me look at the comfortable life modernity grants me, what the cost is, and whether it's worth fighting for justice when I'm not personally inconvenienced by injustices around me (Answer: YES)
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us - Made me realize that the world as I know it can be a very very different world from non-humans, and that all that we think we know is limited by our senses and what we can deduce from them, and that is actually not very much. It's non-fiction about animals, but excellent fodder for pondering aliens.
For a world I'd want to port into, I agree that it's tricky for a lot of Fantasy, although I'd love to go to a Bed and Breakfast in The Shire. If you get to have special powers when you're there, like Howl from Howl's Moving Castle, that wouldn't be so bad though. I'd probably want to port into the world of the White Space novels by Elizabeth Bear (see Ancestral Night). It's a future where people live almost totally in harmony with all kinds of super-funky aliens, one person had a custom pet made from the genes of a dinosaur and that kind of tech sounds rad, and my favourite feature: You can manually control your chemical reactions to manipulate things like stress, adrenaline, alertness, depression, etc. The result is a still human but far less toxic world, plus making friends with giant mantis monsters.
BOOK OF THE MONTH DISCUSSION
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews Amazon link Bookshop link
ScottM: Sushi fan board! Let's discuss our favorite stelka, obviously the main character of the novel. Discord Link
John Taloni: Early readers, what'cha think? Got a one-week "skip the line" library read and am plowing through. At about the 15% mark now. (Gonna have to read that much every day!) Initial take, this reminds me of World of Tiers. Not in specifics, but in that both are portal fiction with a wink-and-nod incorporation of the real world. Also, yes, there's violence, but so far it has happened off screen. I'm kinda hoping that continues. The premise is fairly original. I'm liking the take. It's a little like The Eyre Affair in that the MC enters a work of fiction, but the use of that material is much different. Discord Link
Ruth: major shade Elaborating on my comment in the announcement thread, my first impression of this book is that the authors are throwing major shade on fantasy writers who leave their book series unfinished and their characters on cliffhangers. There are a few examples, like Patrick Rothfuss or Scott Lynch, but the one who particularly sprung to my mind was George RR Martin. The world of This Kingdom, with its rival families, constantly plotting and backstabbing, feels quite Game of Thrones-y. There’s also a grimdark element of callous cruelty to a lot of the characters’ (supposed) fates that reminds me of GRRM. I haven’t finished the book yet so I can’t comment on how it all develops, but what I’ve read so far feels like a bit of a commentary on fantasy authors who create tangled narratives about plots and conspiracies and sadism and then never get around to finishing them. Goodreads Link
Steve: I don’t think that word means what you think it means I’m enjoying the book, but - and I know this is a small hill to die on - as far as I’m aware, a coif is basically a hat. At most, it’s a head covering that also covers the neck. I can’t for the life of me work out how everyone seems to be using one to hide their face. What am I missing? Every time I come across this, it pulls me out of the story. Goodreads Link
ADDENDUMS
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