It's time to taste Toad in the Hole with Ellen Klages as we discuss why it took 40 years from the time she wrote the first sentence of her Nebula Award-nominated story "Passing Strange" to finish the tale, what a truck filled with zebras taught her about the difference between storytelling and real life, how cosplaying helped give birth to her characters, what she finds so fascinating about creating historical science fiction, why revising is her favorite part of writing, the reason she's the best auctioneer I've seen in my lifetime of con-going, what she teaches students is the worst mistake a writer can make, how her collaboration with Andy Duncan gave birth to an award-winning novella, whether she still feels like "a round peg in genre’s polyhedral hole" as she wrote in the afterword to her first short story collection, and much more.

Time travel to 1993 for lunch with Arlan Andrews, Sr., Gregory Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Charles Sheffield as we discuss how <em>Gilligan's Island</em> gave TV viewers the wrong idea about scientists, the ways in which most science fiction isn't actually science fiction at all, but rather <em>engineering</em> fiction, what's wrong with portraying scientists as if they're any different than non-scientists, why Stephen King's <em>The Stand</em> gave such a negative picture of science and technology, the dangers of letting governments control science, why real science, like real art, is work, the reason scientists need to be more aggressive about the ways in which they're portrayed, and more.