It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and a single Follow Friday Featured Blogger each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
- Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
- Follow the Featured Blogger of the week - Rabbit Ears Book Blog.
- Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
- Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
- Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
- If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
- If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
- If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
I listen to several podcasts, almost all of which are related to speculative fiction or gaming in some way. Here are seven of my favorites, listed in alphabetical order:
The Audio Guide to Babylon 5: Hosted primarily by Erika Ensign, Chip Sudderth, and Shannon Sudderth, this podcast is essentially an episode by episode discussion of the Babylon 5 television series, starting with Midnight on the Firing Line, and taking on each episode in order thereafter. Originally started in 2014, the podcast is just over halfway through the episodes. Each podcast installment starts with a spoiler-free discussion of the highlighted episode, and then, after a warning, moves on to a comprehensive examination of how the episode fits into the overall narrative, which includes plenty of spoilers. Although the podcast is exclusively focused on individual episodes of the show, the affiliated website had discussion about a somewhat wider range of Babylon 5 related topics.
The Coode Street Podcast: Hosted by science fiction editors, publishers, and critics Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan, the Coode Street Podcast is a somewhat eclectic podcast whose primary focus can best be summed up as "discussion about topics involving printed science fiction". The podcast frequently features authors and editors as guests, and has round table discussions of individual books as a regular feature. Episodes touch on an incredibly broad range of topics ranging from the death of the midlist, to books the hosts are looking forward to, or analyses of recent genre awards, issues related to translations of the science fiction, and on and on. The only thing that one can really count on with this podcast is that Wolfe and Strahan will tackle and interesting topic and discuss it in an intelligent and engaging manner.
Doctor Who: Verity!: Named after Verity Lambert, the original producer for the Doctor Who television series, this podcast is basically six smart women discussing all things related to the titular television show. Hosted by Erika Ensign, Katrina Griffiths, L.M. Myles, Tansya Rayner Roberts, Deborah Stanish, and Lynne M. Thomas, this podcast features episodes about virtually every aspect of Doctor Who, ranging from round table discussion about freshly released "New Who" episodes, analysis of classic "Old Who" episodes, and general commentary about themes that run through the show, speculation about possible future developments in the series, and updates about fandom and fan-related issues. One of the elements that makes this podcast so interesting is that despite their shared love of Doctor Who, many of the women have very different ideas about what parts of the show are good, and what elements make the show interesting and worth watching.
Galactic Suburbia: Hosted by author Tansy Rayner Roberts, publisher and editor Alisa Krasnostein, and editor and critic Alexandra Pierce, Galactic Suburbia is a podcast about all things related to genre fiction from the feminist perspective of three Australian women. This is, without a doubt, my favorite podcast as all three of the hosts are delightfully entertaining, and brilliantly insightful. Their Australian accents don't hurt the podcast either. Each episode usually starts with the hosts revealing what culture they had consumed since the last episode, and then usually moves on to a discussion about topical issues related to genre fiction and fandom. Part of the excellence of the show stems from the fact that the areas covered by these three ladies are so wide ranging: Sometimes they make "spoilerific" episodes about a particular movie, book or television show, and other times they talk about their favorite kind of cake, and still other times they talk about sexism and how it affects the production of genre fiction, and the nature of fandom.
Rocket Talk Podcast: The official podcast sponsored by Tor.com and hosted by Justin Landon, the Rocket Talk podcast is primarily focused on interviews with authors, editors, and other creative individuals within the field of genre fiction. Because it is affiliated with Tor.com, the podcast is able to draw an amazingly high quality of guests, including (but not limited to) authors such as Ken Liu, Fran Wilde, Ferrett Steinmetz, Myke Cole, and Elizabeth Bear. Although most episodes focus on the work and career of the featured guests, there are a handful of more general episodes sprinkled in here and there - recent examples of these types of episodes include one focused on the question of whether the musical Hamilton counts as genre fiction, a discussion about Naomi Novik's novel Uprooted, and another that explored the show Gotham and the prominence of superhero-based television programs.
Under Discussion: A tabletop gaming-oriented podcast primarily hosted by Dustin, Brady, a Kevin, three gaming buddies from Kansas City, Under Discussion covers pretty much every topic related to gaming, from role-playing games, to board games, to how to use movies and history as elements to enhance one's game playing experience. The podcast also has regular features such as "Forced Filmography", where the hosts inflict terrible movies upon one another, and "draft" episodes where they do a Fantasy Baseball style draft related to some nerdy topic such as "Best Superhero Team", or "Starship Crew". As one might expect for a tabletop-gaming oriented podcast, the highlight of their year revolves around Gen Con, for which they do a "carcast" episode recorded during their drive from Kansas City to Indianapolis, and several interviews with prominent gaming industry figures.
The Writer and the Critic: Hosted, as one might expect, by writer Kirstyn McDermott and critic Ian Mond, this podcast is a literary oriented speculative fiction podcast that essentially consists of a discussion about books between the two hosts. Each episode focuses on two speculative fiction books, one selected by each host, and features a fairly in-depth analysis of each one, with the conversation often veering into comparing and contrasting the two books with one another as well as other speculative fiction works. One interesting element of this podcast is that it is very consistent with this format. Unlike many of the other podcasts on this list, The Writer and the Critic simply does not ever stray from the "two people discuss two books" format.
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