Last month I blogged about Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim, a glorious, gritty revenge novel from hell, tinged with Aleister Crowley, Tom Waits and Raymond Chandler. Sandman Slim, AKA Stark, is one of Los Angeles's magicians, and 11 years ago, his fellow magicians sent him to hell because they were jealous of his power. — Read the rest

Richard Kadrey's new novel Sandman Slim is the most hard-boiled piece of supernatural fiction I've ever had the pleasure of reading. William Gibson says it's a "deeply amusing, dirty-ass masterpiece" and that's just right.

Eleven years ago, James Stark was banished to hell by his circle of magic buddies, betrayed by his supposed friends for the crime of being a better magician than them. — Read the rest

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

I saw Richard Kadrey and Heather Shaw reading at the SF in SF series this weekend.

The readings were good and somewhat cyberpunk/urban-fantasy. — Read the rest

Issue #7 of FLURB, Rudy Rucker's astoundingly awesome free sf zine, has just hit the net, with a collection of stories from some of my favorite authors, including a collaboration between Rudy and John Shirley, and work by Madeline Ashby and Terry Bisson. — Read the rest

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

My friend Richard Kadrey introduced me to infra-red photography. Sensors on digital cameras can detect infra-red, but normally are shielded from it by a protective filter that resides as a thin layer over the chip. — Read the rest

Loss sez, "Night Shade Books has just made Jon Armstrong's novel GREY available as a free download (as they did with Richard Kadrey's BUTCHER BIRD last month). This stunning 'high-fashion dystopia' has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and is one of the best books I read last year. — Read the rest

Richard Kadrey — a charter member of cyberpunk's original vanguard, author of the wonderful Metrophage — has a new novel out at long last, and it was worth the wait.

Butcher Bird is Kadrey's extended, mythological celebration of all things deviant, transgressive, queer, perverse and broken. — Read the rest

The excellent SFinSF reading series continues on August 15th at 7PM with Brian Herbert, Kevin Anderson, Richard Kadrey. These are free readings and panels by prominent science fiction authors, and this isn't one to miss. I'm halfway through Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird, and it's incredible — a seamless and savage blend of underground losers and dark mythology. — Read the rest

Paul Di Filippo notes that it's the twentieth anniversary of the first issue of SCIENCE FICTION EYE, one of my favorite zines.

SFE was born in the heady cyberpunk years, in the wake of the folding of Bruce Sterling's CHEAP TRUTH, when he bade his disciples to go forth and found a million zines to carry on the good and noble fight for better speculative fiction.

Cyberpunk pornographer Richard Kadrey has just launched an sf video podcast called "Dispatches From Probability Beach" wherein he narrates his noir stories, accompanied by slides and clips that he's shot around the world. It's great, like Garrison Keillor meets Blade Runner. — Read the rest

Great news! One of my all time favorite writers, Rudy Rucker, has launched a new web zine, called FLURB.

My present strategy is simply to post a few stories by myself and my friends. I have some good stories for Issue #1, with possibly a few more coming in.

Richard Kadrey says: Confiscating sombreros will be bad news for internationally-known performance artist and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Guillermo Gomez Pena. Ever since 9/11 he's been stopped repeatedly at airports for being suspiciously brown-skinned. His solution is to wear a sombrero to chill out jittery jet crews and nervous passengers alike. — Read the rest

Charles Platt says: "In the 1920s, surrealists exploited randomness to create art.
The simplest and most widely copied system involved one
person writing a phrase or creating an image at the top of a
piece of paper, which was then folded over to conceal it. — Read the rest

The Scratchophone wearable DJ rig is Alari Thierry's "final term project as a business management student." The first ever public demonstration took place last week at the Urban Music Festival at Earl's Court, London. The little van is a modified "Vinyl Killer," a self-contained phonograph needle and speaker that, on its own, will play a record by driving around the grooves. — Read the rest

Richard Kadrey is one of the original guard of cyberpunk authors; his Metrophage is a classic of the genre. He's just posted the full text of his latest novel, Blind Shrike, to the web as a free PDF download.

The book is titled Blind Shrike.

Richard Kadrey sez: "American soldiers traumatised by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares." Link

Nice Wired News story about the rise of alterna-porn, medium-core erotica starring punk/goth/raver women. These sites are small, cheap, non-exploitative, profitable and a (comparatively) huge hit with women. The models look like real (pierced, tattooed) people, and members visit as much for the chat and the model-blogs as for the photos. — Read the rest

Richard Kadrey — the cyberpunk co-founder of Future Sex, author of Metrophage, co-editor of the Dead Media project and photog for Suicide Girls — has finally put up a personal site. Lots of good stuff here, especially full-length novels and other lovely bits of writing. — Read the rest

My publisher's asked me to send them an author photo to use in publicity/book-jackets/etc on my upcoming novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." Richard Kadrey was kind enough to snap some portraits yesterday, and now I can't choose which one to send in. — Read the rest

The Infinite Matrix, an infinitely cool (heh, I made a funny) online sf zine that folded after one ish is back! And BoingBoing played no small part in that renaissance: When the first ish of IM went online, with a blog from Bruce Sterling, short fiction from a string of Hugo winners, and a lovely lookenfeel, we ran a link to it, which got picked up and propagated to Wired News, /., — Read the rest