I thoroughly recommend the latest episode of the Sofanauts, and not for once just because it’s a freaking episode of the Sofanauts (missed that theme tune so much!) but because it’s a frank and at times harrowing interview with Peter Watts.

Watts, a marvellous SF writer whose short story “The Island” is up for a Hugo this year, made the internet explode a few times over the last year with the news that, upon returning to his home in Canada after a convention in the US, he was stopped by customs officials, beaten up, maced, and arrested for not getting on the ground fast enough. He tells his story, as well as the awful legal consequences and the progression of his trial, to Tony C Smith, showing a surprising amount of humour and philosophy. It really is worth a listen, if only because it highlights how fragile our assumptions about liberty and fairness really are.

It’s amazing that Watts is holding up as well as he is considering his experiences! And while he won’t be travelling to the US again any time soon, I am glad to hear he is considering coming to Aussiecon this year. As long as, you know, our customs officials behave themselves…

In case you missed me bouncing and squeeing on Twitter last night, my favourite podcast The Sofanauts is back! The new episode features the legendary Tony C Smith chatting with Cheryl Morgan and our own Jonathan Strahan about the Nebula results, and the changing face of the SF awards landscape.

While it’s not quite the old format, which I was rather attached to, and it didn’t have Jeremy Tolbert and Jeff VanderMeer ranting about Asimovs, it was still an excellent, interesting conversation which will hopefully lead to many more. Apparently the Sofanauts will continue with occasional special episodes rather than the old weekly format, but I’m not complaining…

The sad demise of Sofanauts was one of the big inspirations for Alisa, Alex and I to finally start up a regular podcast of our own. We’d previously only managed to produce one annually, which is just not good enough, and at one point we seriously considered asking if we ourselves could take over the Sofanauts brand. Ultimately we decided that whatever we did would end up being so different that calling it anything like the Sofanauts would be a massive cheat. And that’s how Galactic Suburbia came to be!

And of course, apart from us being a group of people sitting around on Skype talking about science fictional stuff, it’s pretty different!

Glad to be hearing that familiar theme tune again, though, and hope for many more eps!

Yes, it’s true, we have a podcast. Alisa (aka  girliejones) ,  random_alex and myself have been talking for quite a while about doing this. Our ears pricked up when the Sofanauts (BRILLIANT podcast) died. We considered volunteering to take over that particular podcast, but then figured that something we did would end up so different, it might be better to be our own thing from the start.

It’s basically the three of us chatting, about what’s going on in the spec fic world, what we’ve been reading, and other topics of interest. An excuse to chat on Skype once a fortnight with two people I love to talk to! How awesome is that?

The title came from all the reading of and about Joanna Russ we’ve been doing lately – it was a term used to deride the science fiction women wrote which was a bit too feminine in subject as well as style. All three of us are researching/reading about feminist SF right now, and while that isn’t directly the theme of the podcast… who are we kidding? It’s us. There’s going to be feminist discussion in there along with the spaceships and flash fiction rants.

Warning: episode one of Galactic Suburbia does not contain a flash fiction rant. I suspect this will not be typical.

Anyway, my honey Aifin offered to produce, and we finally found a night we can all talk to each other (only a 3 hour time difference but so tricky to juggle that and children’s bedtimes!). It’s a bit rough around the edges as to be expected for a first ep (I listened to episode one of my beloved Radio Free Skaro to inspire me beforehand, and it was really, really bad) but we are planning to do one of these every fortnight so I expect a steep learning curve.

Check out Galactic Suburbia, episode one!