Baseball writer Keith Law guested on the podcast four years ago. Since then, he’s finished reading all the Hugo winners, and Seth wanted to have a chat with him about which books lived up to the hype, which surprised him, and a few that let him down.
Seth weighs in on the same questions, despite being six novels short of the whole list.
Keith has also published a new book since his last appearance, The Inside Game, and it’s even better than his first book Smart Baseball.
Time Codes:
Quick catch up with Keith’s job – Start
Bias Cat! – 2:19
Little bit of baseball talk about the Seattle Mariners – 3:25 – 4:30
Retrospective on reading all the Hugo Winners – 4:30 – 9:25
Rendezvous With Rama – 7:20
Books that lived up the hype
(Keith/Seth) Hyperion – 9:47
(Keith) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – 11:50
Books that surprised us:
Connie Willis – 21:28
Among Others: 22:10
Doomsday Book – 25:52
Vorkosigan Saga – 23:03
The City & The City – 28:23
The Fire Upon the Deep / A Deepness in the Sky – 30:41 (also a mention of Rainbow’s End)
Ancillary Justice – 34:33
Network Effect – 35:01
Way Station – 35:31
A Canticle for Leibowitz – 37:15
They’d Rather Be Right – 38:50
Blackout/All Clear – 42:45
Books that let us down:
(Keith) Cyteen/Downbelow Station – 40:32
(Seth) Neuromancer – 44:48
(Seth) The Uplift Series – 47:50
(Keith) The Diamond Age – 49:45
(Keith) The Calculating Stars – 51:00
(Keith/Seth) The Mars Trilogy – 56:53
Passing references:
Dune
Ender’s Game
Speaker for the Dead
Piranesi
The Dispossessed / The Left Hand of Darkness
American Gods
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Man in the High Castle
The Wanderer
The Gods Themselves
The Broken Earth Trilogy
The City We Became
The Wanderer
The Big Time
The Foundation Series
I really enjoyed this episode, it was great to hear you both cover so many books and that you have different opinions on a bunch of them (and I have different opinions to you too!) It made me think about the influence of when I read certain books as part of whether I like them or not. I read Neuromancer a few years after it came out and loved it, but I was probably the prime age to love it as I was late teens and had read quite a lot of SF by then, so it felt like it really pushed the genre and made the other books I was reading (a lot of Asimov, Clarke and random others) feel pale in comparison.
One thing I found difficult in the episode was I was listening outside and it was difficult to keep track of which book you were talking about as you had a tendency to say the title once, then you both referred to “it” and not the title again (apart from complaining about the Mars books.) If I missed the title because of noise, or had to stop and restart the podcast, it made it hard to work out what you were talking about without hunting back (often then finding the wrong book). Mentioning the title more would be really good, or a list of titles in the show notes would have done as I could have worked it out from there.
Thanks for this and the other episodes. I started listening a year or two ago and am still picking earlier episodes of books I’ve read as well as listening to the new ones.
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll go back in and add time codes for the titles. It was a very flowy conversation, never intended to have a ton of structure but I can see that could be frustrating.