The second episode of the Last Short Story podcast has been posted and is available for listenting. This month Ian Mond and Jonathan Strahan are joined by co-founder Tansy Rayner Roberts to discuss Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling’s After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia.
As part of the pre-season for the podcast, they continue to refine the format. This time they accept that they’re not going to get through nineteen stories, however fine they may be, in an hour podcast, so they restrict themselves to discussing these six stories, all of which rank amongst the year’s better stories, and several of which are clearly amongst the best:
- “The Segment,” Genevieve Valentine
- “Valedictorian,” N.K. Jemisin
- “Blood Drive,” Jeffrey Ford
- “The Easthound,” Nalo Hopkinson
- “Fake Plastic Trees,” Caitlin R. Kiernan
- “The Marker,” Cecil Castellucci
These aren’t the only good stories in the book, by any means, but in the collective opinion of the podcast panel they easily justify the time spent reading the book.
You can listen to the podcase online for free here: Last Short Story, Episode 2
