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

Hello and welcome to episode 262 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Theodora Goss.

Her story Singing of Mount of Bora won the 2008 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and her

work has also been nominated for many other major awards

including the 2007 Nebul Award for Pipp and the Ferries. She's also the author of

Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks which won the 2004 Reesling Award for Best Long Poem,

as well as the novel The Thorn and the Blossom, A Two-Sited Love Story,

and the Short Story Collection in the Forest of Forgetting.

And we'll be speaking with her today about her new novel, The Strange Case of the Alchemist daughter.

And now here's our interview with Theodora Goss.

All right, so we're here with Theodora Goss.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, how are you doing, David?

I'm good, good.

Okay, so your new book is called The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter,

and it was inspired by some of the research that you did for your PhD.

So tell us about that. So I'm playing this PhD, which is a crazy

thing to do anyway. It just about killed me. And I wrote this 400 page doctoral dissertation and it was

on Victorian Gothic fiction. Dr. D

And it was on Victorian Gothic fiction and anthropology.

But it was really about monsters.

...