Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 217 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Kish Johnson.

She's the author of the novels The Fox Woman and Foodoki, as well as the short story collection

at the mouth of the River of Bees.

She's worked at Tor Books, Wizards of the Coast, Dark Horse Comics, and Microsoft,

and is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Kansas.

And we'll be speaking with her today about

her Novella the Dream Quest of Vellat Bow of feminist take on HP Lovecraft and

now here's our interview with Kiz Johnson. All right so we're here with Kish Johnson.

Welcome to the show.

Hi.

Okay, and so your new book is called The Dream Quest of Vellet Bow.

So what's that about?

It's, uh, It's a complicated answer because there's the meta-fictional answer which is that it's a sort of commentary on in response to H.P. Lovecraft's, the dream quest Unknown Caddeth, which is one of his better known works.

The other answer is that it's the story of a woman of a certain age who goes out on a quest, which makes her a very unusual character in the middle of a world, a strange and very bizarre world.

Well, right, so for people who aren't that familiar with Lovecraft's dream cycle stories, you want to just say a little bit about the background of those?

Sure. H.P. Lovecraft was writing a lot in the early 20th century. I don't remember the exact dates and he wrote a series of stories called the Dreamlands stories. It's one of the things are called. The idea is that there is a dreamland that certain master dreamers all male can get to.

It's a world ruled by these whimsical sort of cosmological horrors and petty immensely powered gods.

The stories are usually very vividly imagined.

And there are certain characters that turn up again and again.

So Randolph Carter is one of his sort of basic characters who

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