Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones

I thought of Uncle Ted's wobbly windows, and I began to think he must really, truly never look through them or anything else. Can't anyone look out there and see that you need not to think of everything in terms of what works or what they ought to do?
Game dev and narrative expert Ariella Bouskila joins us for a discussion of bad colleagues, sick empires, beautiful boys, katabasis ducks, and the magic that can be found all around us if you have the eyes to see but can perhaps especially be found at a 1990s science fiction convention.
NB: As much as we would like not to, this one inevitably contains some conversation about Neil Gaiman.
Transcript available here, and we'll be wrapping up our season in two weeks with Dark Lord of Derkholm!

Mitt at last came out with the real cause of his disappointment with the North. "They told me it was free here," he said. "They told me it was good."
North and South, history-time and story-time, past kings and future kings, bicycle horses and evil-haunted trains and a really truly impressive array of bad dads all meet on Dalemark's green roads in the book it took Diana Wynne Jones fifteen years to write.
Transcript available here, and we'll be back in two weeks with Deep Secret!

This wood is like human memory. It does not need to take events in their correct order. Do you wish to go to an earlier time and start from there?
It's a portal fantasy! It's a space opera! It's an office comedy! It's an epic romance! It's an exploration of parenthood! It's a metaphor for authorship and creative control! It's King Arthur! It's Siegfried! It's ten books in a trenchcoat playing 4D chess with each other, and we could probably talk about it for another four hours and still have more to say.
Transcript available here, and we'll be back in two weeks with Crown of Dalemark!

The restraints of knowledge harmed this wild power. In order to use it, Zillah could not know what it was. It would only answer a being as untrammeled as itself.
Time for elves, centaurs, demons, gods, witches, monks, princes, soulbonds, spaceships, sex, death, and an ever-present toddler, in undoubtedly the wildest book of Diana Wynne Jones' career to date.
Transcript available here, and we'll be back in two weeks with Hexwood!

What's the good of being civilized? That's what I want to know. It just means other people can break the rules and you can't.
The gender dictatorship, the horror of conformity, the limits of word power, and how to stop your mother-in-law from living rent free in your brain.
Transcript available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gnTKOU9XOofGvXZR4CdpBVJI-qYp5UqO/view?usp=sharing
And we'll be back in two weeks with A Sudden Wild Magic!