Alternate title: "The Snorting Wonder of the Plains." As Paul Di Filippo says at Weird Universe, "This cover could hardly be improved upon for macabre glee and impartial offensiveness." Read the story here.

Paul Di Filippo describes Ben Parzybok's new novel, Sherwood Nation: "The book is obviously as headline-friendly as the Ferguson riots, inequality debates, Occupy protests and climate change reports; but there's also a Joseph Conrad-Grahame Greene-Shakespeare style concern with the nature of power, the roles that are thrust upon us, and the limits of friendship and love." — Read the rest

Author Paul Di Filippo did a residency for Matera, a legendary, ancient Italian city and wrote "Chasing the Queen of Sassi" based on his experience of the region.

The 2013 Locus Awards final ballot has been announced, and as ever, it is a fabulous guide signposting some of the very best work published science fiction and fantasy in the past year — a perfect place to start your explorations of the year's books. — Read the rest

Tony from StarShipSofa sez, "StarShipSofa is hosting a live writers workshop all in video with SF writers Mike Resnick and Paul Di Filippo.

StarShipSofa built its reputation by featuring science fiction from the best authors of our time, from living legends whose works have inspired generations to the rising stars of the genre. — Read the rest

A harmonica that works like a player piano.

Rudy Rucker has put every goddamned one of his mind-bendingly awesome short stories on his website for free. This includes collaborations with some of the best names in the field ("This huge collection includes collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Paul Di Filippo, Marc Laidlaw, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker Jr., — Read the rest

Madcap science fiction paragon Paul Di Filippo's column in the latest Fantasy and Science Fiction takes the form of a short story demonstrating a new (to me) potential consequence of lifetime-based copyrights, human longevity, and the idea that copyrights should be extended to benefit a creator's descendants. — Read the rest

Paul Di Filippo says:

This is not an artifact of me fooling around with Photoshop. Nor can I imagine some Google drone did this during the newspaper-scanning process. You're welcome to look at the original here.

My guess is some bored artist or letterer in 1947 seeing what he could sneak past the editor.

Paul Di Filippo says:

Thought you might like the video that we posted to the AT&T Tech Channel today. It's a 1977 film that highlights a new Bell Labs-developed system for building advertisements to publish in the Yellow Pages. While very crude by today's Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks/whatever standard, the scanner + dynamic design system was a huge leap forward for workers used to setting their own type and photos.

Hurrah! It's time for another issue of Rudy Rucker's absolutely ass-kicking free sf zine, Flurb. The new ish has stories by Paul Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, Richard A. Lupoff, Danny Rubin, and Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz (incidentally, I've been reading Koja's new book in manuscript form and I am agog at its brilliance — watch this space in the months to come for a review of Under the Poppy). — Read the rest

Luis Ortiz sent me a copy of his new book, Cult Magazines: A to Z: A Compendium of Culturally Obsessive & Curiously Expressive Publications, which he co-edited with Earl Kemp. It's a remarkable history of special interest magazines from the 1920s to the 1990s, arranged alphabetically. — Read the rest

Cause for celebration: the new issue of Flurb, Rudy Rucker's wonderful free sf zine, is live, including work from Greg Benford, Paul Di Filippo, Howard Hendrix, and many other talented and lovely individuals.

We have a lot of great stuff in Flurb #8.

Paul Di Filippo sent me this editorial by Richard Nash, founder of Soft Skull Press (publishers of the Get Your War on books): "Why Publishing Cannot Be Saved (As It Is)." It's a ass-kicking take on the hackneyed cliches of those who discuss the future of the publishing industry ("Twitter/DRM/Facebook/copyright law will save us!") — Read the rest

Via Rudy Rucker by way of Paul Di Filippo, this cartoon, in which Donald Duck bakes a plastic airplane. The trouble starts when Donald takes his plane for a spin and it starts to melt in the rain — Read the rest

High C sez, "The Sucklord is a renaissance man who lives in New York and makes, among other things, incredible limited-edition toys. Check out his latest Creature From The Black Lagoon/Green Army Man mash-up, and then dig into the archives for things like the Gay Stormtrooper and a Micronauts/Fisher-Price Little People mash-up." — Read the rest

If ever there was a thing made for me, this is it. Cosmocopia is a novel by Paul Di Filippo and a 513-piece jigsaw puzzle and color art print by Jim Woodring, beautifully packaged in a cardboard box radiating with eldritch vibrations. — Read the rest

The New York Times fashion and style section has a nice piece today on the aesthetic influence of steampunk on fashion and art:

Devotees of the culture read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, as well as more recent speculative fiction by William Gibson, James P.

Last month, I mentioned Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's Steampunk anthology in passing, but the book deserves better than that. I've just spent several highly entertaining hours with my advance review copy and I'm knocked out. What a great piece of work this is, from the fascinating triumvirate of essays that recount the history of steampunk in literature and describe its contemporary appeal to the top-notch works of fiction inside, from forgotten proto-steampunk gems by Michael Moorcock and James Blaylock to contemporary pieces from Neal Stephenson, Jay Lake, Ted Chiang and Paul Di Filippo (among many others). — Read the rest

I've just posted the first installment of a podcast reading of a new novella that I co-wrote with Hugo- and Nebula-nominee Benjamin Rosenbaum. The story's a big, 32,000-word piece called "True Names" (in homage to Vernor Vinge's famous story of the same name), and it involves the galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences that are competing to corner the universe's supply of computation before the heat-death of the universe. — Read the rest