Ep 52: Team Binabik with Stewart Hotston

Stewart Hotston is the chair of the BSFA.

Stewart’s choice: Memory, Sorrow and Thorn by Tad Williams (First in the Dragonbone Chair trilogy. It is 5 1/2 cm deep.

You can see the original cover on Tad Williams’s website

Ali’s choice: Shadow of the Fox by Julie Kagawa. It is considerably less thick.  

The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey. A novel about a child, but not a children’s book.

Aliette de Bodard’s essay On Motherhood and Erasure. Anna Smith Spark’s  A Sword of Bronze and Ashes is one of the few fantasy books where a mother is the protagonist. Catherynne M. Valente’s excellent The Refrigerator Monologues addresses the phenomenon of fridging women characters as a plot device and motivation for male superheroes.

Stewart recommends Richard Swan, David Wragg and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle for interesting takes on mythology and folklore.

Wuxia such as Monkey adapted from Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. Zen Cho’s novelette The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water.

Historical C-dramas are very big on yearning glances. Stewart is currently watching Veil of Shadows.

Stewart recently read The Library of Broken Worlds by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

The most challenged books.

The CLPE’s Reflecting Realities report demonstrates that the number of children’s books with protagonists of colour published in 2025 was lower than in previous years. Stewart wrote a blog about representation and the Clarke Awards.

EasterCon is the British SFF fan-run con that travels around the UK. Next year it is in Glasgow!

Find Stewart online! Website, Bluesky, Nerds of a Feather. Read Project Hanuman.