Rick Kleffel sez,

Tim Powers is one the founding fathers of steampunk, and a writer whose every book is superb. I drove down to San Bernardino City College to talk to him about his latest work, Hide Me Among the Graves, a secret supernatural history of the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters.

Rick Kleffel's always-great Agony Column podcast interviews Matt Ruff about his extraordinary "golden rule" alternate history novel The Mirage, in which the Arabia is the cradle of democracy, the USA is a collection of basket-case Christian theocracies, Germany has been partitioned in a two-state solution that makes Berlin the capital of Israel, and a war on terror is launched when Christian "crusader" terrorists crash jetliners into Baghdad's Twin Towers. — Read the rest

Rick Kleffel and the Agony Column have a long podcast interview with Jonathan Lethem commemorating the publication of his new essay collection, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc., a discussion about how art builds on other art and how writing is done:

An interview about 'The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.'

Rick sez, "Lev Grossman and Rick Kleffel speak about Grossman's latest book (MP3 link), The Magician King, and its roots in both C. S. Lewis and Evelyn Waugh. Grossman talks about the book as a fantasy that takes the magical utopian aspects seriously and then sends them up with snarky, 21st-century prose. — Read the rest

Rick Kleffel from The Agony Column podcast sez, "I've been talking with Daniel H. Wilson since his first book, How to Survive a Robot Uprising, came out. When I heard about his new book, Robopocalypse, I managed to wrangle a copy in advance, read it in a heartbeat and loved the heck out of it. — Read the rest

The next installment San Francisco's excellent SF in SF reading series features two decidedly happy mutants: Diana Paxson & Rudy Rucker. It's on this Saturday, January 15 at 6PM, and it's free to attend: The Variety Preview Room Theatre, The Hobart Bldg., — Read the rest

This week, Rick Kleffel, one of my favorite book interviewers, talks to Kevin Kelly about his book What Technology Wants, one of the best books I've ever read about technology. The conversation is fascinating.

11-09-10: A 2010 Interview with Kevin Kelly

MP3 link

(Thanks, Rick, via Submitterator! — Read the rest

Rick Kleffel sez, "I've recently posted an interview with China Miéville about his new book, The City & The City — certainly one of the most unusual books you could read this year. He talks about the challenges of working in two genres — the fantastic and the hard-boiled mystery genre — in one novel." — Read the rest

Rick Kleffel sez, "John W. Campbell Award winning author Jay Lake will be in the studio on Saturday, July 12 for GeekSpeak, to be interviewed by RIck Kleffel, Lyle Troxell and Sean Cleveland. We'll be taking your phone calls at 1-800-655-5877, or you can email me your questions in advance (agony@trashotron.com). — Read the rest

NPR's Rick Kleffel sez, "WIth Lyle Troxell and Sean Cleveland of Geekspeak, I'll be interviewing William GIbson live in the studio and taking your calls on Tuesday, June 10, from 10-11 AM. You can hear us on NPR affiliate KUSP 88.9 FM in central California or live on the web at kusp.org/live. — Read the rest

Many science fiction writers and readers recoiled in horror when Howard Hendrix (who was then the vice-president of the Science Fiction Writers of America) decried writers who give away their work online, calling us "webscabs" and threatening a future filled with "pixel-stained techno-peasants" whose fortunes had been destroyed because of us scabbing give-it-away-ers. — Read the rest

The latest installment of Rick Kleffel's Trashotron podcast is an interview with sf greats Karen Joy Fowler (whose magic realist novel about Chinese rail workers on the US frontier, Sarah Canary, still haunts me, nearly 20 years after I first read it), Kelly Link (author of the magnificent short story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners) and Gavin Grant (Kelly's husband and publisher of Small Beer Press and the wonderful sf zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet). — Read the rest

NPR's Rick Kleffel sends us a link to "Over an hour with William Gibson, talking about the Fortean Times, SF as based in the present, the history of cyberpunk, and, and, and … more."

Link

(Thanks, Rick!)

Here's a pretty righteous move on the part of CNN management — kudos to them. Remix fun for the whole family! Snip:

The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them.

I just finished Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, a funny, quiet, improbable book about an art-rock band in Los Angeles that might be making it big.

I'm an enormous Lethem fan, and have been since Gun With Occasional Music, a hard-boiled detective story by way of Philip K Dick, and I particularly love how versatile he is, every book really different from the last. — Read the rest

Some news about Overclocked, my new short story collection:

• My Los Angeles book-signing is coming up this Thursday, Feb 15 at LA's Secret Headquarters comic shop, from 7PM onwards.
• NPR's Rick Kleffel has just posted a long, in-depth interview he did with me last week in San Francisco, just before my signing at Borderlands Books.

NPR science fiction reporter par excellence Rick Kleffel has just posted an MP3 of his interview with cyberpunk legend Rudy Rucker. I love Rudy's books — his latest, Mathematicians in Love is one of the greatest nerd-hero sf novels I've read, a mindbending trip through the math of interdimensional travel. — Read the rest

NPR's Rick Kleffel aired a great segment about economics and genre fiction, with Charlie Stross, Jeff VanderMeer, TC Boyle and others. He's hosting a non-DRM MP3 of the piece, too, so you can be spared the sucky NPR Real stream.

During the Cold War, science-fiction tales of alien invasion mirrored society's fear of Communism, and monsters from Frankenstein to Godzilla have tapped into our unease about the boundaries of science.

Rick Kleffel's awesome science fiction podcast Trashotron has just posted an interview with Charlie Stross, my frequent collaborator and author of the forthcoming sf supernatural thriller The Jennifer Morgue.

Bob Howard–a T-shirt–wearing computer geek and field agent for the super-secret British government agency The Laundry–must save the world from eldritch horrors, codenamed Jennifer Morgue, in this fast-paced spy thriller.

Rick Kleffel produced a great NPR segement on the Singularity, interviewing both me and Vernor Vinge (author of the amazing Rainbows End) on the subject.Regrettably, the file is only available as a Real and WMA stream, but if you happen to make and MP3 of it, dropload it to doctorow@craphound.com — Read the rest