Recorded live at The Lost Church in San Francisco, April 13th, 2025 ABOUT THE AUTHORS DARYL GREGORY, the multiple award-winning author of critical darling SFF novel Spoonbenders, has a new book out! It’s called When We Were Real (Saga Press, April 1, 2025), set in America seven years after we all learn we are living in a simulation. It’s a madcap adventure following two friends on a cross-country bus tour through the mind-boggling glitches in their simulated world as they grapple with love, family, secrets, and a recent cancer diagnosis. When We Were Real is a tour-de-force and exploration of what really matters, even in an artificial world, which has received fantastic praise from numerous leading SFF authors, including Lev Grossman, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Ben H. Winters, and more. Daryl writes novels and short stories in a variety of genres, but has also written comics and video games. He teaches every year at the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop (apply!), as well as doing some programming on the side. He grew up in Chicago, and has lived in a few states along I-80 — Pennsylvania, Iowa, Oakland — and now splits his time between Seattle, WA (which means he spends a lot of time in coffee shops. A lot), and State College, PA. His latest novel is When We Were Real (Saga Press, 2025), and before that was the Appalachian horror novel, Revelator (Knopf), a 2022 Dragon Award and Locus Award finalist, and Washington Post book of the year. His SF murder mystery novella The Album of Dr. Moreau was an Edgar award finalist. The novel Spoonbenders was a Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award finalist. His novella, We Are All Completely Fine (Tachyon Publications) won the World Fantasy and the Shirley Jackson awards, and was a finalist for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards. NGHI VO is an American author of short stories, novellas, and novels, who identifies as queer. Born in 1981 in Peoria, Illinois, where she lived until attending college at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan in 2007. Her first published short story was “Gift of Flight” in 2007, followed by a number of published short stories in various media. Vo’s fantasy novella The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the first title that launched her Singing Hills Cycle, was published in 2020. It received considerable acclaim and won the Hugo Award for Best Novella, and the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Crawford Award. The book was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Nebula Award, the Locus and the Ignyte Award. The next book in the cycle was When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (2020), followed by Into the Riverlands (2022), Mammoths at the Gates (2023), and The Brides of High Hill (2024). The novellas can be read in any order. Her debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, was published in 2021. The novel is a queer fantasy adaptation of The Great Gatsby which reimagines the character of Jordan Baker as a woman of Vietnamese descent who was taken to Louisville as a young child, and raised by a wealthy, white American family. Vo’s second novel, Siren Queen (2022), an urban fantasy set in pre-Code Hollywood, was followed by The City in Glass (2024). Her new book, Don’t Sleep With the Dead, is a companion novel to The Chosen and the Beautiful. ​She believes in the ritual of lipstick, the power of stories, and the right to change your mind.