Locus hosted a roundtable conversation between good friends and State College, PA denizens Daryl Gregory, author of We Are All Completely Fine, and James Morrow, most recently of The Madonna and The Starship fame. The extraordinary duo discuss not only their recent works but the newly minted cinéma du sang, pop culture, PTSD, and many absurd points in-between.

Daryl Gregory: We’re having this conversation by email, but I’m going to pretend we’re sitting in a bar. Even though we live in the same town, and not even a very big one—that’s State College, Pennsylvania, for you readers—I think we see each other more often in other cities, at cons. Is that sad, or just typically science fictional?

James Morrow: I think it’s both sad and science fictional. Writers live in their heads, don’t they?

D: My head has terrible table service. We did finally get together at our local brewpub a couple months ago to talk about free will and consciousness. That was a lot of fun, and was exactly the kind of conversation I used to imagine that science fiction writers had all the time, before I met some and realized we mostly talk about agents and publishers.

So when Alvaro said he’d give us space to talk on the Roundtable, I first thought that we could continue that conversation. But then I finished your new stand-alone novella, The Madonna and the Starship, that’s out now from Tachyon. My own novella, We Are All Completely Fine, is coming out in August. They’re really different books, but I thought we could talk about how both of them use pop culture as a main ingredient.

J: Good idea. But maybe we can sneak in some stuff about free will and its alleged sovereignty.

Read the rest of the fascinating conversation at Locus.

For more on The Madonna and the Starship, visit the Tachyon page.

For more on We Are All Completely Fine, visit the Tachyon page.

Covers and design by Elizabeth Story.