S1 Int5 - July Editor's Desk

Alex Zubin· Host0:00

Welcome to Biome. This is Alex Zuben, your host, narrator, and the sentient transdimensional vortex that's just happy to get you from one jump gate to another. [upbeat music] As you may have seen from the title of today's episode, today is our first segment of what I'm calling Editor's Desk. In print magazines, editor's notes provide a peek behind the curtain, a chance to directly participate in a conversation with the editor of the journal. The Editor's Desk segment will play a similar role for Biome. It gives me a chance to share my thoughts directly with you, thoughts about Biome, about stories, and about fiction more broadly. Today, I want to talk about why I launched Biome and why I launched it now. I've always enjoyed stories, reading them and writing them from a young age. Over the last few years, I've also started to listen to audiobooks and podcasts such as Clarkesworld, Pseudopod, and Podcastle. I hope these names are familiar, but if not, I urge you to check them out. They've got some amazing stories, and I'm indebted to them and to the people who have worked hard to keep them going. However, as I listened to these podcasts, I realized I wanted to do something a bit different. I wanted a podcast that combines speculative fiction with the joyful, passionate approach that LeVar Burton takes in his delightful podcast, LeVar Burton Reads, first reading a story, then discussing how and why he connects with it.