I. O9 presents the Geek's Guide to the galaxy. And here are your hosts, John Joseph Adams and David Barr

Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 37 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Hi, I'm John Joseph Adams and I'm the editor of several anthologies as well as Lightspeed Magazine and Fantasy magazine.

A couple new books I have coming out are The New Adventures of John Carter of Mars, which is about

John Carter of Mars, armored which which is about power armor and Mecca, and the med scientist

guide the world domination, which is about mad scientists.

And I'm David Barr Hurley.

I'm the author of many short stories including the ontological factor

about a nervous philosophy student who finds himself in a house full of doorways to other worlds.

The story will be appearing in the September-October issue of Cakeda magazine. And our guest today is Ellen Kushner, author of novels such as Swords Point, Thomas the Rimer, and The Fall of the Kings.

For over a decade she was the host of Sound and Spirit, which Bill Moyers called The Best Program on Public Radio, bar none.

And her most recent project is Welcome to Border Town, a shared world anthology set in a magical city that lies halfway between our world and the

off land of folklore. All right well let's get to our interview. All right so we're

here with Alan Kushner welcome to the show. Thank you so much great to be here.

Okay so your latest book is in anthology called Welcome to Border Town, which you co-edited with Holly Black.

So first of all, could you just give us a bit of background on the Borderland series?

What's it about and how did it all get started?

Back in the mid-80s

there was a big fashion in what they called shared world anthologies

where one person made up a world and then got all their friends or, you know,

all their esteemed colleagues to write stories set there and people shared characters

...