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

Hello and welcome to episode 387 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Cadwell Turnball.

His short fiction appears in magazines such as Light Speed, Nightmare, and Asimov Science Fiction.

And his short story, loneliness is in your blood appeared in the

best American science fiction in fantasy 2018 and we'll be speaking with him

today about his debut novel The Lesson about mysterious aliens who occupy the

US Virgin Islands.

And now here's an interview with Cadwell Turnbull.

All right, so we're here with Cadwell Turnbull.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Okay, so how did you first get interested in fantasy and science fiction?

I think watching TV as a kid.

So one of my favorite shows growing up was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And so I watched that almost like every week staying up late.

I also liked the spin-off angel, watched a lot of space shows. One of my favorites was Stargate

SG1. And yeah, so a lot of TV, a lot of film, and then when I was in high school they assigned 1984, which was at, at the time, didn't seem to me like a science fiction book.

I didn't know what that meant,

but I knew that I liked it more than the other books that we were reading.

And so that got me interested in reading books of that kind.

In college I read some Ursula Gwen.

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