So I went and checked out the Literature podcasts category over at the iTunes store to see if Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy would show up on the list anywhere. I figured it was a long shot, but I thought we might sneak in at number 197 or something. But this is what it’s showing me:

Is that for real? Are those results personalized for me or something? Anyway, move over Oprah, there’s a new media empire in town.

Here’s a robot that fetches beer and plays pool.

My short story “Family Tree” is now free to read online over at the official website for the John Joseph Adams anthology The Way of the Wizard. This is a story where everything just really fell into place. If you only read one thing I’ve written in the last few years, read this one:

“Family Tree”
Illustration by Michael DiMotta:

Details:

Garrett, Elizabeth, Sebastian (baby), Bernard, Simon

Malcolm, Meredith, Meredith’s mother, Nathan

The Tree of Victor Archimagus

The TV adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s brilliant and shocking graphic novel series The Walking Dead premieres tonight! And it’s available through iTunes! Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy just interviewed Kirkman, and we’ll be including that interview, along with our reactions to tonight’s program, in Episode 25.

John Joseph Adams just announced that he’ll be editing Fantasy magazine starting in March.

Here’s Ray Bradbury and Hugh Hefner discussing Fahrenheit 451 (which was serialized in Playboy). Hefner also mentions this interesting bit about Charles Beaumont, which I wasn’t aware of:

The first original story to appear in Playboy was by Charles Beaumont and it was called “Black Country,” and it was about a black musician, and a year after that he brought us a science fiction story that Esquire had rejected because of its controversy … the title of it was “The Crooked Man,” and it was the story of a future society in which gay was the way of things and heterosexual was the aberration, and was persecuted, and in the 1950s that was a very controversial notion, believe me … And I was very proud to have published it, and Charles Beaumont had a long and illustrious — until his untimely death — connection to us, and for his contribution, along with the many things Ray himself brought to us, I am forever grateful.

The lecture Dialogue of Reason: Science and Faith in the Black Community begins with Richard Dawkins explaining his T-shirt reading We Are All Africans. He notes that our ancestors emerged from Africa only about 100,000 years ago — no time at all to an evolutionary biologist. He goes on to note that:

If you look at the molecules of modern human races they are astonishingly uniform, and such variation as there is is mostly within Africa, so that suggests that the deepest divides of cousinship in our species are within Africa. The whole of the rest of the world is a very, very recent branch off the human species. If you look at the amount of variation within the human species genetically, it’s extremely low; we are a very, very uniform species, compared to other species, even chimpanzees. It’s been said that if you take two chimpanzees from the same forest in Africa, they’re likely to be more different from each other genetically than any two humans in the world.

Wow! Check out this amazing photo by Poras Chaudhary: Colorful India. It’s a crowd in India watching a wrestling match at a local fair and is apparently not a collage.

Here’s another work that I’m really glad to see is now available on audio: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. This is the scariest book I’ve ever read, in spite of the fact that nothing overtly “horrific” happens in it. In fact, the book apparently scared the author so much that he wrote it in one mad rush and then refused to ever look at it again. It also made China Mieville’s Top 10 list, and he remarks, “I went for Stigmata because I remember how I felt when I put it down. Hollow and beaten. I kept thinking: ‘That’s it. It’s finished. Literature has been finished.'”

The story is that in the future colonists are living on Mars, and Mars is soul-crushingly boring. The colonists escape by taking a drug called Can-D, which allows you to play with Barbie-like dolls and believe that you’re actually living the life of the doll instead of your own life. Unfortunately there’s never enough Can-D to go around. Then the explorer Palmer Eldritch returns from deep space, bearing a new and improved drug, Chew-Z. But is this really Palmer Eldritch, or some sort of alien? Those who take his drug even once find that they’ve embarked on an acid trip that will never end; every time you think it’s over, you encounter someone who bears the three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch — the glass eyes, the metal teeth, the robotic hand. And no matter how many shifting realities you tumble through, one thing remains constant: in all of them, Palmer Eldritch is God.

This image, which I really like, has popped up in a few different places as a screenshot from Dungeon Siege 3. I can’t find any indication of who the artist is. Anyone know?

Just in time for Halloween, Lightspeed magazine has released “A Taste of Starlight” by John R. Fultz, about an interstellar voyage gone horribly, horribly wrong. The site warns: “The following story contains mature content, including violent and graphic imagery that some readers may find disturbing.” Believe me, they’re not kidding.

Very depressing but not entirely unexpected: Realms of Fantasy magazine is shutting down. You can read goodbye statements from publisher Warren Lapine and editors Shawna McCarthy and Doug Cohen.

For years now two of the series I’ve most wanted to get on audio were Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books, and I’ve bugged Audible repeatedly to make them available. Well, I recently checked again, and the four volumes of Book of the New Sun are now online, as well as the first of the Bas-Lag books, Perdido Street Station. (Hopefully The Scar, which is by far my favorite of the three, will follow soon.)