This week on the podcast, Patrick and Tracy welcome Yoon Ha Lee, author of Code and Codex.

About Code and Codex: In the stars-spanning Censorate, languages other than the Republic’s own lingua rubra, which has reality-altering properties, are forbidden. Nevertheless, there are discrepancies. The Censorate’s star forces are called the Athenaeum Navy, and each of its ships is referred to as a codex. Instead of port and starboard, its soldiers refer to verso and recto. The unholy “stigmata” gouged into the ships’ hulls might, to a foreign scholar, bear a resemblance to verboten texts in other languages.

The Censorate is ruled by its Peacock, Aurelia, feared for the power of panopticon: she can look through anyone’s eyes. Moreover, Aurelia’s mastery of lingua rubra lets her force anyone who can understand her to follow her orders. Valentina, sold to Aurelia’s family as a child to be Aurelia’s oath-sister and companion, is its Swan, responsible for extracting useful information from foreign texts, then destroying them as well as entire languages through arcane arts. Valentina is assisted in her work by lower-ranking linguists and AI assistants who accept temporary contamination by foreign languages as a necessity of their work.

But this isn’t enough for Aurelia. She wants to control and deploy the Censorate’s thousand-year traitor and prisoner, the Basilisk, a man with a gaze so lethal that he destroyed its fleet of old through camera feeds. Unfortunately for her, the Basilisk gave himself a form of aphasia that makes him immune to her commands.

About Yoon Ha Lee: Yoon Ha Lee is a Korean-American sf/f writer who received a B.A. in math from Cornell University and an M.A. in math education from Stanford University, and is pursuing an MFA in media composition and orchestration at ThinkSpace Education. His young adult mecha novel Moonstorm won the Locus Award for Best YA Novel, is currently a finalist for the Ignyte Award (YA), and was a finalist for the Nebula Award (YA). Yoon’s novel Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, and Clarke awards. His middle grade space opera Dragon Pearl from Rick Riordan Presents won the Mythopoeic Award for Children’s Literature and the Locus Award for best YA novel, and was a New York Times bestseller. Yoon’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as Reactor (formerly Tor.com), Audubon Magazine, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s anthology Take Us to a Better Place. His TTRPG Ninefox Gambit RPG, co-authored with Marie Brennan, was a Nebula finalist in game writing. He has written comic scripts for Marvel (Doom’s Division #1-5 and “Epée Is Truth” in The X-Men: The Wedding Special #1) as well as game writing (Counterplay Games’ Godfall, Failbetter Games’ Winterstrike, Alderac Entertainment Group’s Legend of the Five Rings CCG).

This week’s picks:

• Yoon: Helldivers 2 (Game)
• Tracy: Uber Ube Smooth Ube Herbal Tea
• Patrick: Click Blocks – TTRPG Modular Terrain Building Blocks

Links:

• Yoon Ha Lee on Instagram
• Tracy Townsend on BluSky
• Patrick Hester on Instagram
• The Functional Nerds Patreon Page

© 2026 Patrick Hester

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