Pre-season Episode 3: The Future is Japanese, Nick Mamatas & Masumi Washington eds.

Summary: Welcome to the third episode of Last Short Story. After an unexpected one month hiatus, this month Ian Mond, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Jonathan Strahan discuss Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington's The Future is Japanese. As we did in episode two, we restricted ourselves to discussing just five stories from this interesting anthology, each of which either rank amongst the year's better stories, or were otherwise worthy of discussion: “Mono No Aware” by Ken Liu “The Sea of Trees” by Rachel Swirsky “One Breath, One Stroke” by Catherynne M. Valente “Golden Bread” by Issui Ogawa “The Indifference Engine” by Project Itoh These are only a small sampling of the thirteen stories in the book, but they proved to be the jumping off point for what we think made for an interesting conversation. Next month: TB