This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Kate Heartfield, author of THE EMBROIDERED BOOK. About THE EMBROIDERED BOOK: 1768. Charlotte, daughter of the Habsburg Empress, arrives in Naples to marry a man she has never met. Her sister Antoine is sent to France, and in the mirrored corridors of Versailles they rename her Marie Antoinette. The […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Malcolm Devlin, author of AND THEN I WOKE UP. About AND THEN I WOKE UP: In a world reeling from an unusual plague, monsters lurk in the streets while terrified survivors arm themselves and roam the countryside in packs. Or perhaps something very different is happening. When a disease […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome the folks from the Beyond the Trope podcast, Giles Hash and Michelle Graham. About Beyond the Trope: “Nerds and geeks unite! BEYOND THE TROPE was a writing podcast before we expanded into general nerdiness. The original co-hosts got tired of snobs telling us that pop culture was rubbish, and […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Mary Roach, author of PACKING FOR MARS: FOR KIDS. About PACKING FOR MARS: FOR KIDS: What is it like to float weightlessly in the air? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a spacewalk? How do astronauts go to the bathroom? Is it true that they don’t […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome John Scalzi, author of The Kaiju Preservation Society. About The Kaiju Preservation Society: When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Andrea Hairston, author of REDWOOD AND WILDFIRE. About REDWOOD AND WILDFIRE: At the turn of the 20th century, minstrel shows transform into vaudeville, which slides into moving pictures. Hunkering together in dark theatres, diverse audiences marvel at flickering images. Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Maurice Broaddus, author of SWEEP OF STARS. About SWEEP OF STARS: The Muungano empire strived and struggled to form a utopia when they split away from old earth. Freeing themselves from the endless wars and oppression of their home planet in order to shape their own futures and create […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Tobias Buckell, author of Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories. About Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories: Traffic is piling up, and strange things are headed your way in this new story collection by World Fantasy Award-winning author Tobias S. Buckell. In these twenty-seven stories you’ll find inhabitants of […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Samantha Cohoe, author of Bright Ruined Things. About Bright Ruined Things: The only life Mae has ever known is on the island, living on the charity of the wealthy Prosper family who control the island’s magic and its spirits. Mae longs for magic of her own and to have […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Gama Ray Martinez, author of GOD OF NEVERLAND. About GOD OF NEVERLAND: Peter Pan is missing; Neverland is in trouble. For adults, that might not matter all that much, but for children—whose dreams and imagination draw strength from the wild god’s power—the magic we take for granted in the […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Max Gladstone, author of LAST EXIT. About LAST EXIT: When Zelda and her friends first met, in college, they believed they had all the answers. They had figured out a big secret about how the world worked and they thought that meant they could change things. They failed. One […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome James Rollins, author of THE STARLESS CROWN. About THE STARLESS CROWN: A gifted student foretells an apocalypse. Her reward is a sentence of death. Fleeing into the unknown she is drawn into a team of outcasts: A broken soldier, who once again takes up the weapons he’s forbidden to […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Mark Sabalauskas, author/creator of the Return to the Stars RPG Game. About Return to the Stars RPG Game: Return to the Stars is designed to allow the creation of characters that evoke the best elements of geek culture. In the far future hyperspace travel gave easy access to countless […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy are live from Capricon 42 with a very special, super-sized show filled with great conversations from all of these amazing people: Lauren Jankowski – author of The Shape Shifter Chronicles (Follow Lauren on Twitter) Megan Mackie – author of The Finder of the Lucky Devil (Follow Megan on Twitter) KM […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Elsa Sjunneson, author of Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism. About Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism: A Deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else. As a […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Rebecca Ross, author of A River Enchanted. About A River Enchanted: Jack Tamerlaine hasn’t stepped foot on Cadence in ten long years, content to study music at the mainland university. But when young girls start disappearing from the isle, Jack is summoned home to help find them. Enchantments run […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Lorraine Wilson, author of This Is Our Undoing and the forthcoming The Way The Light Bends. About This Is Our Undoing: In a near-future Europe fracturing under climate change and far-right politics, biologist Lina Stephenson works in the remote Rila Mountains, safely away from London State. When an old […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Nicole Glover, author of the Murder & Magic series – The Conductors and The Undertakers. About The Conductors and The Undertakers – Hetty Rhodes and her husband, Benjy, were Conductors on the Underground Railroad, ferrying dozens of slaves to freedom with daring, cunning, and magic that draws its power […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy are talking about 2021 with the obligatory year-end recap episode! We’re taking a look back at our favorite episodes from 2021, how things went and what challenges we had. The ups and the downs. Links: Tracy Townsend on Twitter Patrick Hester on Twitter The Functional Nerds Patreon Page © 2022 […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Monica Byrne, author of THE ACTUAL STAR. About THE ACTUAL STAR: The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents —telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle. Braided together are the […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Derek Kunsken, author of The Quantum War (book 3 of the Quantum Evolution series). About The Quantum War: The war rages onward and the Union’s premier fighter pilots, the Homo Eridanus, start encountering deadly resistance from strange pilots on the Congregate side. Among wreckage, they find that new Congregate […]
This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome CJ Cooke, author of The Lighthouse Witches. About The Lighthouse Witches: When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go […]