Weird dream I just had:

I was walking down a city street and somehow also reading a rant someone had posted online about how one of their favorite things had been cancelled while stupid crap like Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy was still going. As I walked, I noticed that this person had even paid to have the rant engraved on the pavestones of the street where I was walking, with one letter on each hexagonal tile, which I thought was uncalled for. We were on our way to interview an eminent scientist, and in my dream we were interviewing him in person rather than over the phone, and there were three of us. At the university I was talking to one of this scientist’s grad students, who warned me that the guy was extremely arrogant, and that you had to say exactly the right intellectual and flattering things to him or he would blow you off. John was just initiating a normal, friendly conversation with the guy, and I hurried to warn him that the guy was a jerk, but it was already too late. The scientist was saying that he could maybe spare two minutes and John was saying we really needed at least thirty, and then the scientist announced that actually he couldn’t even spare two, and he retired to his office. John then realized that as we’d entered the building a book had fallen out of his bag, and the scientist had helped him pick it up and had glanced at the cover, and it was a book about fishing, and this must have further contributed to the guy’s judgment that we were intellectual lightweights, which wasn’t fair because it wasn’t even John’s book and there was some random reason why it was in his bag. By this time John wasn’t John anymore, but an innocent-looking guy with a round face and curly red hair.

My friends were in favor of just heading home, but I was angry and I knocked on the door of the scientist’s office and explained that my friends had driven here all the way from Philadelphia, and I’d driven all the way from New York, and surely he could spare thirty minutes. He insisted that he couldn’t, and closed the door. We went through several rounds of me pounding on his door and him shutting it in my face. Finally I was so angry that I went into his lab and just started sweeping experiments off the tables and onto the floor, where they shattered, and I was grabbing up everything and tossing it over my shoulder, destroying what I knew to be millions of dollars worth of equipment and samples and world-changing scientific advances. Then I went back to the office and marched in and announced, “I’m glad you like spending time in your office so much, because your lab’s not looking so hot!”

But then I realized I was in the wrong room, and that I’d walked into David Hartwell’s office. I apologized for intruding, and remarked that I needed to go find the right office so I could give that scientist a piece of my mind, and David Hartwell said, “No, you’ll do no such thing. Just let me take care of this. I’ve been through this before,” and he opened a drawer in his desk and took out a folder, which contained letters and photos. The letters were from George R. R. Martin, and began, “Dear [blank], it was great having you at the workshop.” My friends and I started filling in our names, which would prove that we’d been at a writing workshop and therefore couldn’t have been the ones to trash the lab. There were also class photos and photos of students milling about that we were supposed to photoshop our faces into. I said that this alibi wouldn’t work, because obviously the scientist would know it was me, because I’d just been shouting at him, and David Hartwell explained that actually what we would need to do was use the letters and photos to project ourselves through into a parallel universe where we actually had been at the workshop, that that was the only way to escape punishment.

And then I woke up.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy will be interviewing Charles Yu, author of the new novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and the short story collection Third Class Superhero. He was chosen as one of the top five writers under thirty-five by the National Book Foundation. If anyone has any questions they’d like us to ask him, feel free to suggest them.

The Center for Inquiry just posted video of last week’s Sam Harris lecture. In his new book The Moral Landscape, Harris (known as one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement) attempts to refute Hume on whether reason can speak to ethical principles. At the very start of the video you can see me standing in line:

So I was out walking just now, and out of nowhere a guy who looks kind of like an affable handyman calls out to me. I was lost in thought, and what he said came through to me as something along the lines of, “Hey, did you hear about the blond couple who were found frozen dead in a river near here?” “No,” I said, shocked. “Yeah,” he said. “They went to see ‘Closed for the Winter.'” Obviously this was supposed to me some sort of joke, so I chuckled politely/awkwardly. As he walked away he said, “Hey, I’m trying here. Work with me.”

So I just googled it, and it turns out the set-up is supposed to be: “Did you hear about the dumb blonde couple that were found frozen to death in their car at a drive-in movie theater?” So maybe the guy actually said “theater,” not “river,” but he definitely didn’t say anything about “drive-in,” which is kind of an important detail.

Finished a new 4,600 word story, “A Day at the Beach.” This is a major rewrite of a story I wrote back in middle school. I was at some sort of extracurricular program, and they had us do a meditation/guided visualization sort of thing, and the preliminaries involved you imagining yourself in various relaxing situations, including walking along a beach. That gave me a really cool idea, and I instantly disregarded the exercise and spent the remaining time working out most of the details of my story. At the end of the session, one of the New Age-y women who was leading the exercise approached me and was like, “It didn’t seem like you were paying attention,” and I shrugged and said, “Oh yeah, I came up with a story idea, so I did that instead,” thus demonstrating the attitude that has endeared me to so many instructors over the years — my simply taking it for granted that the lesson plan is so far below me intellectually that the teacher must concur that it would be a waste of my time for me to actually pay attention to it. I’m always kind of taken aback when they get all offended. Don’t they realize how inane they are? Anyway, I wrote the story and thought it was great. It was never published, but every once in a while I’ll describe the concept to someone, and it reliably evokes a “Wow, that sounds awesome” sort of reaction. I just dug the story out, and along with it was a sixteen-year-old rejection letter I’d forgotten about from Merlyn’s Pen. I read the rejection letter, then read the story, and yup, the rejection letter pretty much hit the nail on the head in terms of what was wrong with the story, so I used that letter as the foundation for writing my new version.

So this morning I sent Amazon an email asking if they could add The Way of the Wizard to my Author Central profile, so that people would see it if they search for my books. Amazon wanted a link that verified that I was actually in the book, so I sent them this link to the table of contents. A few hours later I get an email saying that they were able to confirm that I wrote a book called Game, Set, Match, and that I would be showing up soon as one of the authors. Obviously I immediately pressed the “No, this did not solve my problem” button, and explained that I wanted to be added to the John Joseph Adams anthology The Way of the Wizard, and sent the link again, and said that I’d never even heard of any book called Game, Set, Match. Well, a few hours later and I’m now listed as one of the authors of Game, Set, Match. I honestly had no hand in writing this book, so all I can tell you about it is that apparently “you’ll want to wait until your significant other is around to read the love scenes. If you love steamy, this book definitely delivers.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy will be interviewing Jennifer Oullette, author of the books Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics and The Physics of the Buffyverse. Her latest book is called The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. So if anyone has any questions they’d like us to ask her, feel free to suggest them. When we contacted her (just now), she replied, “I’ve actually started listening to your podcast since you moved to io9. It’s great and I’d be honored to be a guest.” Wow. Even more testament to the mojo of io9.

Wow, I knew io9 was popular, but I guess I didn’t realize how popular. In the last ten months, Episode 1 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy has gotten the most page views of any episode, with just over 5,000, and also a handful of comments. Episode 22, our first to appear on io9, has already gotten 16,000+ page views and almost 100 comments in less than 48 hours. (And a fair number of those comments are even about something other than my annoying chuckle.) I mean, I’m sure it helps that it’s George R. R. Martin (who even linked to us from his blog), but still, what a difference.

Here’s the table of contents for the John Joseph Adams anthology The Way of the Wizard. Check out my story in the #2 slot, right after George R. R. Martin. Not too shabby.

In the Lost Lands — George R.R. Martin
Family Tree — David Barr Kirtley
John Uskglass and the Cambrian Charcoal Burner — Susanna Clarke
Wizard’s Apprentice — Delia Sherman
The Sorcerer Minus — Jeffrey Ford
Life So Dear Or Peace So Sweet — C. C. Finlay
Card Sharp — Rajan Khanna
So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen — Genevieve Valentine
The Go-Slow — Nnedi Okorafor
Too Fatal a Poison — Krista Hoeppner Leahy
Jamaica — Orson Scott Card
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice — Robert Silverberg
The Secret of Calling Rabbits — Wendy N. Wagner
The Wizards of Perfil — Kelly Link
How to Sell the Ponti Bridge — Neil Gaiman
The Magician and the Maid and Other Stories — Christie Yant
Winter Solstice — Mike Resnick
The Trader and the Slave — Cinda Williams Chima
Cerile and the Journeyer — Adam-Troy Castro
Counting the Shapes — Yoon Ha Lee
Endgame — Lev Grossman
Street Wizard — Simon R. Green
Mommy Issues of the Dead — T. A. Pratt
One Click Banishment — Jeremiah Tolbert
The Ereshkigal Working — Jonathan L. Howard
Feeding the Feral Children — David Farland
The Orange-Tree Sacrifice — Vylar Kaftan
Love is the Spell That Casts Out Fear — Desirina Boskovich
El Regalo — Peter S. Beagle
The Word of Unbinding — Ursula K. Le Guin
The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria — John R. Fultz
The Secret of the Blue Star — Marion Zimmer Bradley

Here’s a funny web comic by Aaron Diaz: Caveman Science Fiction.

Episode 22 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, featuring our interview with George R. R. Martin, is now available through iTunes. Note that this is a new, different feed from our old one. Future episodes will show up on this one.

Episode 157 of Tony C. Smith’s StarShipSofa podcast features a short Q&A with me and John Joseph Adams about us relaunching Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy over at io9. The Q&A begins at 10:36 into the episode.

Here’s a new interview with John Joseph Adams at Redstone Science Fiction.

Here’s the final cover design for the John Joseph Adams anthology The Way of the Wizard, which includes my story “Family Tree”:

The Marion Zimmer Bradley story is “The Secret of the Blue Star,” from Thieves’ World #1. It’s one of my childhood favorites, and one I suggested for inclusion, and it’s very cool to see my story collected alongside it. George R. R. Martin’s “In the Lost Lands,” a staggeringly dark fairy tale, is also a must-read.

Lots of my friends have been linking to the results of the recent survey by the Pew Forum that showed that as a group atheists know more about religion than religious people do.

Of course, these days I know WAY more about religion than most people, but for a long time I was at a distinct disadvantage, having parents who weren’t religious and never took me to church. I remember once as a kid I was on a bicycle trip and a woman said to me that I had to listen to my mother because “even Jesus had to obey Mary,” and I said (not joking) “Mary who?” There was also the time I got the NES game Ghosts & Goblins for my birthday, and I was reading from the instructions booklet to my friends, and I mispronounced “Satan” as “satin,” and everyone made fun of me. Until they explained it to me, I had just assumed that “Satan” was a made-up video game monster, like “Gannon.” I also got mocked by my college roommate once for my unorthodox pronunciation of “Pontius Pilate.”

Of course, unlike me, most atheists used to be religious. Through my involvement with organized skepticism, I’ve heard the stories of probably 70-80 people about why they gave up on religion, and I’ve heard the same basic story over and over again, but I’ve never heard anyone comment on one particular pattern, so I thought I’d note it in passing. Basically it’s this: You have two siblings, Sibling A and Sibling B. Sibling A is dutiful and Sibling B is feckless. As teenagers, Sibling A goes to church, studies the Bible, and plans to become a minister, nun, religious scholar, etc., whereas Sibling B thinks religion is a joke and spends all their time drinking, having sex, and doing drugs. Sibling A spends so much time on serious study of the Bible that the contradictions, historical inaccuracies, immoral teachings, etc., eventually become too much for them, and after a years-long period of agonized soul searching they give up on religion and become an atheist. In the meantime, Sibling B has made a total mess of their life — various addictions, lousy job, unplanned out-of-wedlock children, etc. — and turns to religion to get themself straightened out. Sibling B becomes some variety of hard-core fundamentalist, raises their children that way, and constantly hectors everyone they know, including Sibling A, to get right with God, in spite of the fact that Sibling B has still not bothered to learn the first thing about what the Bible actually says. Anyway, anyone else noticed that pattern? I’ve seriously heard some variation on that story dozens of times now.